Martin Bell, the former BBC war reporter and Independent MP, served as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment during the Cyprus emergency between 1957 and 1959. In a chocolate box in the attic many years later he found more than 100 letters that he had sent home to his family. The letters pre-date his journalistic career, but give a vivid impression of what it was like to be a conscript on active service during the EOKA rebellion against British rule. They describe road blocks and cordons and searches, murders and explosions and riots – and a strategy of armed repression that ultimately failed. From this beginning he has written The End of Empire.

As featured on BBC Radio, BBC News 24 and in The Bookseller, The End of Empire is much more than a personal reminiscence. It is an absorbing account of the experience of army life from the perspective of a private soldier, and it is the inside story of how Britain tried to crush a violent rebellion sixty years ago.

Join John Johnson Allen this Saturday at a special signing event for T. E. Lawrence and the Red Sea Patrol. The event will take place on Saturday, 18 July at Diss Publishing Bookshop & Café, Diss (IP22 4AH) from 10.30am-1pm.

Although many books have been written about T E Lawrence and the Arab Revolt, none before has fully explored the pivotal role of the Royal Navy in the Red Sea at the time. This is the first book to be written about the Navy’s role in the success of the Arab Revolt in the creation of the legendary figure of Lawrence of Arabia. Following extensive and detailed research into the activities of the ships of the Red Sea Patrol by the author, a maritime historian and former Merchant Navy officer, it has become evident that, without the work of those ships, the Arab revolt would have failed and T E Lawrence would have remained an obscure officer in the military bureaucracy of Cairo.

David Venner will be attending the Royal Horticultural Society Book Fair this Sunday at RHS Garden Rosemoor.

The fair is open from 10am-4pm and will feature a range of independent booksellers from across the South West. David Venner will be on stand to discuss and sign copies of his book, Despatch Rider on the Western Front 1915–1918. The book is a skilfully abridged version of the diary of a First World War motorcycle despatch rider, Sergeant Albert Simpkin, who was attached to the HQ 37th Division. The diary entries, and some longer descriptions of the main actions of the Division, provide a fascinating record of the life of a despatch rider on the Western Front; one day dodging shell holes and ammunition limbers to take his despatches to the front, the next observing the quaint but often courageous lives of the local populace. Throughout the diary are colourful and amusing anecdotes about his fellow soldiers, and critical comments on the strategies and tactics employed by the officers.