Books by James Owen

An accessible compilation of news-breaking stories from The Times. As one of Britain's leading newspapers for more than 200 years The Times has covered every major world events as they happened. This book profiles the ones that have had the most impact on the world today from the fall of the Berlin Wall to stepping onto the Moon.

June 1940: As Britain's soldiers limped home from Dunkirk, a maverick Army officer was already devising a bold plan to hit back at the enemy. His idea was to revolutionise military thinking and change the face of warfare for ever. Relying as much on stealth and guile as on courage and stamina, the Commandos brought to the battlefield the skills of the guerrilla. Trained by an unconventional band of experts, and led by a big-game hunter, a film star, a Highland chief and an eccentric wielding a bow and arrow, they became the spearhead of the Allied drive for victory.Weaving together official documents, new research and veterans' own accounts, Commando reveals for the first time the exhilarating full story of WWII's most formidable fighting force.

Autumn 1940: the Front Line is now Britain itself. With invasion imminent, cities are blitzed nightly as for the first time a nation becomes the target of a campaign of aerial assault. And even after the planes have passed overhead, a deadly menace remains: thousands upon thousands of unexploded bombs. Buried under ground, their clocks ticking remorselessly, UXBs blocked supply routes, closed Spitfire factories and made families into refugees. Dealing with this threat soon became Churchill's priority.For the first time, Danger UXB reveals the story of this desperate struggle against the ticking clock. It was a battle of wits that pitted German ingenuity against British resourcefulness, told through four key figures in the new science of bomb disposal: Robert Davies GC, who saved St Paul's Cathedral; Stuart Archer GC, protector of the vital Welsh oil refineries; the extraordinary Earl of Suffolk GC; and John Hudson GM, the horticulturalist who mastered the V1. An astonishing and compelling account of courage and self-sacrifice, this is the truth of how the Blitz was beaten.

Night comes quickly to the Bahamas. That of 7 July 1943 was unpleasantly close and humid, for though the rains were nearing their end, the air was heavy with an approaching storm. It struck Nassau soon after midnight. By the time it had blown itself out, one of the world's richest men, Sir Harry Oakes, had been murdered in his own bedroom. He had been burned alive, then had his skull broken by four blows to the head. When the body was found at daybreak, bloody handprints marked the walls of the room, while a fan stirred small white feathers that clung to the charred corpse on the bed. Beyond it, the window stood wide open. Even in the middle of wartime, Oakes's death commanded front-page headlines in the world's newspapers, and began a series of events whose protagonists included the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway, two French aristocrats, a suspected Nazi and a grey Maltese cat, and which culminated in the sensational trial and acquittal of Oakes's own son-in-law for the crime. Owen's brilliant telling of the story stands alongside James Fox's WHITE MISCHIEF as a true-crime classic as well as an extraordinary portrait of a glamorous and corrupt society.