Books by Jim Ring

1946: Britain is occupied by the Nazis. Hitler is assassinated triggering a struggle for power among the Nazis, revolt across the Occupied Continent, and schism in Washington. A thriller and literary cryptogram that numbers Princess Elizabeth, Churchill, Edward and Wallis, Roosevelt, the Kennedys and sundry Forces Chiefs in its Tolstoyan cast.

We Come Unseen, first published in 2001, follows the careers of six Royal Navy submariners from their graduation from Dartmouth's Britannia Royal Naval College in 1963, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Between these dates, it seemed that nuclear war was never far away - and Jim Ring explains not only the nuclear threat and its beginnings in the last days of the Second World War, but why the Polaris and Trident submarines ('capable of inflicting the damage of the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki many times over'), and their accompanying attack submarines, were critical to avoiding war. Alongside a gripping narrative of the Cold War game of hide-and-seek played out under the waves of the northern seas, Ring gives an account of the history of submarine warfare from its earliest, pre-nuclear days to the 1982 combat in the Falklands.'A welcome acknowledgement of one of the Cold War's little-known aspects.' Alan Judd, Sunday Telegraph'An extraordinary story . . . one of the most significant naval books of the year.' Ship's Telegraph'A remarkable story.' Navy News

For English read British which is not to quibble with the title but, as Jim Ring himself explains, 'During the period on which this book focuses, it was the custom - in the words of a Scot - ''to let the part - the larger part - speak for the whole.'' Those countries which received them - France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and above all Switzerland - all talked of the English, and the presence of the English in the Alps was precisely so described. To use the term British would thus have been an anachronism.'The nineteenth century will forever be associated with the growth of the British Empire, but nearer home there was a quieter conquest taking place. Gradually the English were taking over the Alps, scaling their peaks, driving railways through them, and introducing both winter sports and those quintessential English institutions - tea, baths, lawn tennis and churches - to remote mountain villages.Jim Ring tells the remarkable story of the English love affair with the Alps, from its beginnings with the Romantic movement, when poets such as Byron and Shelly wrote of the mountains with awed delight, through the great days of the 1850s and 1860s and the formation of the Alpine Club, to the inter-war years when the English assured the future prosperity of the alpine resorts by virtually inventing and then popularizing downhill-skiing.Part history, part biography, How the English made the Alps brings the characters - the artists, the scientists, the gentleman-adventurers, the invalids, the aristocrats, eccentrics and mountain-scramblers - vividly to life.'Jim Rings's book cannot be bettered.' Daily Mail'Fascinating' Stephen Venables, Daily Telegraph 'Evocative and entertaining' Financial Times'A comprehensive, well-written account of a fascinating subject' Guardian