Books published by publisher John Lane the Bodley Head Ltd.

A hundred years ago in Western Australia there lived a boy called Midnite. He was seventeen and all alone in the world except for five animals - a rather silly cow called Dora, a tall and noble-minded horse called Red Ned, a short-tempered cockatoo called Major, a willing sheepdog called Gyp and a very wise and handsome Siamese cat called Khat. Midnite himself, although nice, was not really very bright and it was Khat who first suggested that he might become a bushranger and call himself Captain Midnite (for non-Australians, a bushranger is a kind of highwayman). His adventures - how he kept getting put in prison by his delightful but treacherous best friend Trooper O'Grady, and how Khat and the other animals kept getting him out - are full of fun and excitement. There was also a girl he wanted to marry, but she was rather treacherous too - not like Mrs. Chiffle who always wanted to hide a bushranger under her bed. Even Queen Victoria was very upset by his bushranging until he finally became a millionaire, and then of course everyone started being very polity, though Midnite had no idea why.

We associate the Holocaust with Nazism, but forget that many of the killers were not even German; we think of concentration camps, yet many victims were murdered in towns and villages, fields and forests. Here a history professor at Yale University demonstrates how it was the invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Russia that made the Holocaust possible; how the destruction of states and institutions created a lawless zone in which anything was permissible; and, chillingly, how it could happen again.

Of all the generals on the American side in the Revolutionary War, Benedict Arnold, in the estimation of George Washington himself, was the best. A brilliant tactician, an inspired commander of troops, a field officer of daring and enterprise, he was responsible for stopping a British drive that could have split the colonies in two. He also very nearly conquered Canada by means of a secret overland attack on Quebec in the dead of winter. Yet Arnold was also a traitor, the most notorious in American history, a man who deliberately betrayed his closest comrades and sold out the West Point fortress to the enemy - the British. Why and how this happened is at the heart of this biography, out of which Arnold emerges as a fascinating, tormented figure, a man who could have been a hero and instead died excoriated, hated by Americans and disdained by the British he chose to help.