In the middle of the eighteenth century, British entrepreneurs unleashed the astounding energies of steam and coal and the world changed forever. Factories, railways and gunboats then propelled the West's rise to power, and computers and nuclear weapons in the twentieth century secured its global supremacy. Today, however, many worry that the emergence of China and India spell the end of the West as a superpower.How long will the power of the West last? In order to find out we need to know: why has the West been so dominant for the past two hundred years?With flair and authority, historian and achaeologist Ian Morris draws uniquely on 15,000 years of history to offer fresh insights on what the future will bring. Deeply researched and brilliantly argued, Why The West Rules - For Now is a gripping and truly original history of the world.

From Wikipedia again...

Jericho is a doctoral student of the mathematician Alan Turing at a Cambridge college. When the war starts Turing and other professors disappear, recruited as code breakers by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS). Eventually Jericho is also roped in, at the invitation of Atwood who is professor of ancient history at the same college. At Bletchley the code breakers are an eclectic academic set, under pressure to break the Enigma code used by German U-boats wreaking havoc on British and American shipping in the Atlantic. The tension is magnified by internal turf rivalry between the allies over the cryptography effort, with the Americans of the opinion that the chummy common-room efforts of the British operation cannot sustain the decryption speed and volume required to win the Battle of the Atlantic. In the book Turing himself is absent from Bletchley, on a trip to Washington D.C.

On a train en route to Bletchley, Jericho happens to meet the attractive Claire Romilly who works as a clerk at one of the huts, temporary buildings on the park grounds housing the growing code breaking effort. Jericho helps Claire finish the Times crossword with ease and the two strike up a friendship. Claire's upper-crust manner reflects what Baxter (a code breaker with leftist views) terms as the organization of Bletchley Park along British class lines. Society debutantes are chosen to handle sensitive transcription whereas the more mundane tasks are delegated to young women from working-class backgrounds. As Jericho gets closer to Claire, he also discovers a weakness in U-boat Enigma protocol that leads to the U-boat code being cracked, thereby establishing his reputation among the code breakers. One night Jericho is stunned to see intercepted (but still encoded) signal transcription forms in Claire's bedroom, a serious violation of security procedure. Confronted with the forms Claire reacts in an emotionally wounded manner, which also signals the end of Jericho's romance with her. However Jericho does not report the incident or the security breach. In the following days Jericho desperately attempts to meet Claire once again, and slowly tips himself over the edge of a nervous breakdown. He is sent back to his college to recover.

When the Germans change the Enigma naval code book, the Bletchley Park code breakers lose their back door and are forced to bring Jericho back. This is in fact how the book begins. Thereafter the plot unravels to answer a series of questions: What are the papers in Claire's bedroom? Is she a spy? How much can Jericho trust Kramer, an American naval officer and one of Claire's many lovers? What is the role of the supercilious upper-crust investigator Wigram? How much does Claire's room mate Hester Wallace know? Are Jericho's hut colleagues Atwood, Pinker, Puck, Baxter ... jealous of him? Will Jericho break the code for a second time as one of the largest convoys steams across the Atlantic pursued by U-boat wolf packs?

Apart from the plot, the book is notable for its grim descriptions of winter in a war-torn Britain.

The book, though fiction, is criticised by people who were at Bletchley Park as bearing little resemblance to the real wartime Bletchley Park.^[1]

An Autumn evening in 1937. A German engineer arrives at the Warsaw railway station. Tonight, he will be with his Polish mistress; tomorrow, at a workers' bar in the city's factory district, he will meet with the military attache from the French embassy. Information will be exchanged for money.So begins THE SPIES OF WARSAW, with war coming to Europe, and French and German operatives locked in a life-and-death struggle on the espionage battlefield. At the French embassy, the new military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, a decorated hero of the 1914 war, is drawn in to a world of abduction, betrayal and intrigue in the diplomatic salons and back alleys of Warsaw. At the same time, the handsome aristocrat finds himself in a passionate love affair with a Parisian woman of Polish heritage, a lawyer for the League of Nations.Colonel Mercier must work in the shadows, amidst an extraordinary cast of venal and dangerous characters - Colonel Anton Vyborg of Polish military intelligence, last seen in Furst's THE POLISH OFFICER; the mysterious and sophisticated Doctor Lapp, senior German Abwehr officer in Warsaw; Malka and Viktor Rozen, at work for the Russian secret service; and Mercier's brutal and vindictive opponent, Major August Voss of SS counterintelligence. And there are many more, some known to Mercier as spies, some never to be revealed.

It is April 1964 and one week before Hitler's 75th birthday. Xavier March, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei, is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin's most prestigious suburb. As March discovers the identity of the body, he uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich.

This latest "New York Times" bestseller by the author of "Archangel" chronicles the suspenseful last days of the legendary ancient city nestled below the slopes of the volcano Mount Vesuvius. "[An] intelligent, engaging historical novel."--"The Washington Post Book World."

Britain's former prime minister is holed up in a remote, ocean-front house in America, struggling to finish his memoirs, when his long-term assistant drowns. A professional ghostwriter is sent out to rescue the project a man more used to working with small time celebrities.

From Wikipedia, because I am lazy...

Most of the action takes place on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, where Lang has been holed up in the holiday home of his billionaire American publisher to turn out his memoirs on a deadline. Other scenes are set in Notting Hill, New York and Whitehall.

Lang's former aide Mike McAra has been struggling to ghost his master's memoirs but, as the novel opens, McAra drowns when he apparently falls off the Woods Hole ferry. The fictional narrator of The Ghost, whose name is never revealed, is hired to replace him. His girlfriend walks out on him over his willingness to take the job: "She felt personally betrayed by him; she used to be a party member". He soon suspects foul play and stumbles across evidence of possible motive, buried in Lang's Cambridge past. Having located what may be the lethal secret, the replacement ghostwriter begins to fear for his own safety.

Meanwhile Lang, like his real-life counterpart, has been accused by his enemies of war crimes. A leaked memorandum has revealed that he secretly approved the capture and extraordinary rendition of UK citizens to Guantanamo Bay to face interrogation and torture. One Richard Rycart, Lang's disillusioned and renegade former foreign secretary (loosely based on Robin Cook), who before and during his early days in office made much of his wish to adopt an "ethical" foreign policy, is now at the UN, in a position to do his former boss serious damage. Unlike Blair, Lang thus appears in imminent threat of indictment at the International Criminal Court.

The narrator tussles to reconcile his obligation to complete the ghosting job with its attendant abundant payment on the one hand and, on the other, the pressing need, as he sees it, to reveal Lang's true allegiances. The action really heats up when he contacts Rycart. The narrator comes under increasing jeopardy: romantically and politically, as well as physically.