Books in pocket GIANTS series

In 218, Hannibal Barca, desperate to avenge the defeat of Carthage in the First Punic War, launched an ambitious ground invasion of Italy. With just a small force, he crossed the Alps and pitted his polyglot army against Rome’s elite citizen infantry. At Cannae, in 216, Hannibal destroyed an 80,000-strong Roman force in one afternoon, delivering a blow unequalled in Roman history for half a millennium to come. The Romans had no answer to Hannibal until the young Scipio volunteered to take over Rome’s armies in Spain. In the decade which followed, Scipio turned Rome’s desperate fortunes into a stunning victory over Carthage. The portrait of Hannibal and Scipio takes the reader through one of the greatest military campaigns in history, driven by two remarkable and fascinating men.

When Darwin announced his theory of evolution by natural selection, he did more than transform biology—he told us that humans too are part of nature. His decisive experience—a five-year round-the-world voyage on the Beagle—set him thinking about the diversity of life, ideas that would challenge the scientific establishment and Victorian society. This concise account of Darwin’s life and work makes vividly clear why his work continues to influence us all.

Isaac Newton believed everything in the physical universe could be described using mathematical relationships. His law of gravity explained why objects fall downwards, how the moon causes the tides, and why planets and comets orbit the sun. While his work has been added to over the years, his basic approach remains at the heart of the scientific worldview. Yet Newton also believed the universe was created to a precise and rational design—a design that was fully understood by the earliest people. Newton considered it his life’s work to rediscover this knowledge. In chasing his impossible goal, Newton managed to contribute more to our understanding of the universe than anyone else in history.

Jane Austen lived just into her forties, rarely strayed from the genteel social circle into which she was born, wrote only six novels, and achieved little fame in her lifetime. Yet 200 years after her death her novels are beloved by readers all over the world who continue to be inspired, beguiled and delighted by her insights into the calculations, and complexities of human hearts and minds. This astute biography gets to the quick of the enigmatic woman who was Jane Austen, and to the enduring qualities in her work which make it so universally loved and admired.

Why is Henry Ford a giant? Because he put the world on wheels. Henry Ford did not invent the motor car, nor did he invent the assembly line or mass production. But more than anyone before or since he is remembered as the man who almost singlehandedly took an expensive contraption of doubtful utility and recast it as a machine which changed the world forever. A Michigan farmer’s son who became a dollar billionaire, a ruthlessly single-minded autocrat who became a folk hero, a pacifist who went on to inspire Adolf Hitler—he was a boss who paid his workers twice as much as his competitors yet waged an unrelenting war on unions and badly abused the power he had worked so hard to attain.

The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most famous and bestselling books of all time, yet the girl who wrote it remains an enigma. The real Anne Frank has been lost, hidden behind the phenomenon that her posthumously published Diary produced. This concise biography will rediscover Anne Frank: telling her story from the beginning to the tragic end. It will place her life within the wider context of the Holocaust itself, and also explore her afterlife: seeking to explain why her Diary still speaks to us today.

Nelson Mandela’s place in history is secure: he was one of the best known prisoners in the world, the first president of post-apartheid South Africa, and a global icon with a degree of moral authority matched by very few. This biography explores his various identities—dashing young urbanite, charismatic nationalist politician, underground military commander and Black Pimpernel, tried, convicted, and a political prisoner for 27 years; president of a democratic South Africa—and assesses these independently of his nigh-mythic status.