Shadows - Inside Northern Ireland's Special Branch

'You go to work and you might be shot dead. You imagine being horribly maimed in a bomb blast. You come home and wonder if you'll be shot at the door. You go to bed with a revolver on the bedside cabinet. At times you wonder if this is really part of the UK'

This was the world inhabited by Richard Latham during his service with the Royal Ulster Constabulary - a force that remains an institution of contradictions and intrigue to many outside observers. Considered by some to be one of the finest police forces in the world, its officers are looked upon by others as the evil storm-troopers of Unionism and the British Goverment. The RUC is now a force undergoing sweeping change in response to Republican demands, yet for 30 years it stood alongside the British Army in a war with Republicans that killed over 300 policemen and injured thousands more.

For 14 years Latham, an Englishman, served as a police officer, both in England and in Ulster, transferring from the English Special Branch to the RUC in 1991. Deadly Beat is his raw and hard-hitting story, giving a unique insight into the grim reality of policing Ulster.

Latham charts the dedication and restraint of officers who witnessed their colleagues die, yet were obliged to play within the rules of the law - rules so loaded in favour of the killers that comparatively few were brought to justice.

This book exposes incidents of racism and religious bias experienced by the author himself. It looks behind the scenes to reveal the extremes of behaviour, alcohol abuse, womanising and petty corruption that the heady cocktail of stress, big pay packets and a sense of 'living for the day' bring to many of the men who don the RUC uniform. Deadly Beat is an open, warts-and-all view of the RUC by a man who makes intuitive comparisons between policing on the mainland and serving in Ulster.

James Douglas's story is one of high adventure in pre-Confederation Canada. It weaves through the heart of Canadian and Pacific Northwest history when British Columbia was a wild land, Vancouver didn't exist, and Victoria was a muddy village.

Part black and illegitimate, Douglas was born in British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1803 to a Scottish plantation owner and a mixed-race woman. After schooling in Scotland, the fifteen-year-old Douglas sailed to Canada in 1819 to join the fur trade. With roads non-existent, he travelled thousands of miles each year, using the rivers and lakes as his highways. He paddled canoes, drove dogsleds, and snowshoed to his destinations.

Douglas became a hard-nosed fur trader, married a part-Cree wife, and nearly provoked a war between Britain and the United States over the San Juan Islands on the West Coast. When he was in his prime, he established Victoria and secrured the western region of British North America from the Russian Empire and the expansionist Americans. Eventually, Douglas became the controversial governor of the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia and oversaw the frenzied Fraser and Cariboo gold rushes.

During the Indian rebellion of 1857, the siege of Lucknow was raised by Generals James Outram and Henry Havelock. Outram was hailed as a national hero, and his statue was erected on the Victoria Embankment in London. Yet throughout his long and eventful career in the Indian army he was frequently at odds with his superiors. Promotion and preferment came slowly, and he was not a wealthy man when he died.

Always the outsider, his ideas were ahead of his time: he believed that the way forward in India was to work with the local people, and not rule over them. His actions frequently brought him into conflict with established British practice, and in the process raised fundamental questions about the morality of empire, as practised by the English East India Company.

As a soldier Outram distinguished himself in action. He was a fearless yet thoughtful leader who was revered and idolised by his men and whose tactics frequently surprised his enemies.

This book sets out the dramatic events which took place during Outram's career in India, from 1820 to 1860, and attempts to place his life in the context of the times in which he lived. It shows how the British presence in India changed that country irrevocably, for good and bad.