Books with author James Holt

A psychological thriller before its time, James Hoggs Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in 1824, takes us back to the world of 18th-century Scotland, into a mind haunted by religious obsession, and driven to commit murder. The events are told from several different viewpoints, so that truth and reality appear to dissolve in this disturbing story of the dark legacy of Calvinist doctrine, and how it led one man to madness. Misunderstood and neglected for more than a century, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is now regarded as a classic of the supernatural, comparable with Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or Dracula.

The main work of Hogg is the Gothic novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), which is put on a par with the works of Anna Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Charles Maturin. In the center of the novel, which takes place in Scotland at the very beginning of the 18th century, is the scary story of the religious fanatic Robert Wingham, the Calvinist obsessed with predestination theory, and the world populated by the creations of his frustrated mind. Or are these ghosts real? They are definitely real for Wingham himself, and the reader can only guess - and shiver. An early masterpiece of psychological Gothic, anticipating the famous Turn of the Screw by Henry James, Hogg's novel at the same time - and religious satire, and a study of the Scottish national character, and much more.

The night of 16 May, 1943. Nineteen specially adapted Lancaster bombers take off from RAF Scampton in Lincolnshire, each with a huge 9000lb cylindrical bomb strapped underneath it. Their mission: to destroy three dams deep within the German heartland, which provide the lifeblood to the industries supplying the Third Reich's war machine.From the outset it was an almost impossible task, a suicide mission: to fly low and at night in formation over many miles of enemy-occupied territory at the very limit of the Lancasters' capacity, and drop a new weapon that had never been tried operationally before from a precise height of just sixty feet from the water at some of the most heavily defended targets in Germany.More than that, the entire operation had to be put together in less than ten weeks. When visionary aviation engineer Barnes Wallis's concept of the bouncing bomb was green lighted, he hadn't even drawn up his plans for the weapon that was to smash the dams. What followed was an incredible race against time, which, despite numerous setbacks and against huge odds, became one of the most successful and game-changing bombing raids of all time.