Penguin Books Australia

When New Zealand forces arrived in Italy following the 1943 Armistice with the Allied forces, it was inevitable they would mingle with the local population. The Italians opened their homes and hearts to the New Zealand soldiers who delighted in finding young Italian signorinas everywhere.

A delightful and informative history of modern music.

Harmony is created by bringing sounds together. In music lessons, we learn how to do this in a formal way: we learn about chords and keys, and we are given rules for using them. This is the textbook way; this is legal harmony.  Everything else – including the sounds that constantly surround us, those of ticking clocks, dogs, traffic...

The first complete monograph on the work of Swiss graphic designer Max Huber (1919-92), one of the most significant designers of the 20th century. Huber's work was consistently innovative, and by combining painting and photography with other graphic media, he remained avant-garde throughout his career, bringing the utopian vision of the modern masters to bear on corporate typography and identity design...

The most comprehensive survey and analysis of 20th-century Brazilian architecture.

Vitamin P is an image-heavy book offering an overview of the state of painting today, and documents the most recent concerns and ideas among contemporary painters. In the wake of new media such as installation, video, performance and digital art, the traditional medium of painting has enjoyed a renaissance among a recent generation of artists.

These extraordinary stories of the pioneering struggles and deep religious conflicts in four generations of Walker's family show...

The modern city of Shanghai rose up from truly 'muddy' origins, both in the soft subsoil its foundations were build upon and its early economy based on a trade in opium, or 'foreign mud'.  Forced open to the British by the unequal Treaty of Nanking in 1842, Shanghai did what it does best: it beat the odds to become a 'bawdy and gaudy' metropolis that, 168 years later, commands a place in the contemporary...

Twelve thousand New Zealand men and women served in the occupation of Japan immediately after the Second World War. This book records memories from those we know as 'J Force'.

Based on revealing interviews with soldiers, airmen, nurses and members of the New Zealand Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, The Occupiers explores Kiwi life in the former enemy territory between 1946 and 1948.

While their loved ones left to serve overseas, most New Zealanders spent the Second World War at home. This book tells the stories of those who stayed behind.

Based on frank, in-depth interviews, Home reveals the reality of civilian wartime life in New Zealand during the watershed years from 1939 to 1945.

Women and men remember, with disarming honesty, the experiences that unfolded for them, including...

' Armadillo doesn't miss a trick. It has . . . a depth and resonance which will make you want to . . . read it again' 
Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday

'One of the classics of the Second World War'  Daily Telegraph

Reginald Jones was nothing less than a genius. And his appointment to the Intelligence Section of Britain's Air Ministry in 1939 led to some of the most astonishing scientific and technological breakthroughs of World War Two.