Showing results by author "James Philip" in All Categories

In the alternative timeline of the post-Cuban Missiles War the swinging sixties never happened. "Ask not of your country" is the fourth verse of the American story of Armageddon. To its friends and enemies alike, the United States seems to have emerged from the October War battered, bruised, but invincible. However, 20 months after the cataclysm, terrible wounds remain unhealed, and the nation of liberty is riven by conflict.

In the aftermath of the October War, Armageddon rumbled on. The war had been fought, won, and lost in less than a day, but regionally and locally, the fighting and the settling of scores went on for years. It was hardly surprising that the fate of three ships of the Royal Netherlands Navy should be, if not forgotten, then allowed to slip under the ‘radar’ of the world. However, no history of the October War is complete without at least a footnote about that "lost fleet". This, insofar as anybody can know at this remove, is its story.

It is February 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. The atomic mushroom clouds over the Mediterranean have dispersed, and now, as the world teeters on the brink of a new thermonuclear war, it is dawning on the "victors" that their "victory", far from being absolute, was tragically pyrrhic. In the uneasy half-peace, the United States stirs from its post-Cuban Missiles War slumber. But will it awaken soon enough to overcome its own divisions to confront the new and terrible forces unleashed by Red Dawn's first paroxysm of violence?

Aftermath is book one of the alternative history series Timeline 10/27/62 - USA. The Cuban Missile Crisis went wrong, and now the American people are about to start living with the consequences of the catastrophe. From New England to the Pacific Northwest, from Washington, DC, to San Francisco, Americans confront to their worst nightmare. Nobody wins a nuclear war.

New York - July 1976 - in a world in which New England remains the sparkling jewel in the crown of the British Empire. It is the day before Empire Day - July 4 - the day each year when the British Empire marks the brutal crushing of the rebellion dignified by the treachery of the 56 delegates to the Continental Congress who were so foolhardy as to sign the infamous Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on that day of infamy in 1776.

It is April 1964 in a world in which the "swinging '60s" never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are pouring down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers like wolves upon the fold. In the United States, the overwhelming popular mood is one of "America first". The "victory" of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction, and grief more futile, than it does in the second week of April 1964. Only one thing is certain: The world is about to be turned upside down again.

Two Revolutions and the Constitution describes how the American Constitution secured the gains of the American Revolution. It tells the story of how the American constitutional system drew on both Americans' experience of partial self-government in colonial America and their understanding of the British constitution. It also tells how, when they were drafting the Constitution, the Framers used what they had learned about effective constitutions since independence. This audiobook describes how the English started that struggle, and the American Constitution completed it.

Fame, fortune, and beautiful models - Howard Chandler Christy had them all. Christy was the most famous American painter of the Jazz Age, a time when an elite brotherhood of New York artists dominated the publishing world. Christy had eclipsed all of them with his ''Christy Girl'', an idealized woman who redefined beauty, influenced fashion, and inspired generations of women.

A little over 20 months have passed since the cataclysm of October 1962. It is a minute before midnight in Philadelphia on July 4, 1964, in a world stumbling inexorably toward a second, even more catastrophic nuclear war. The United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom have stepped to the edge of the thermonuclear abyss; who will blink first? In All Along the Watchtower, the main series and the USA series of Timeline 10/27/72 merge into a single global narrative of the most desperate hours in human history.

Isaac Fielding knows exactly where he stands: Things were not looking good. Upon that, at least, everybody could agree. The other thing that everybody seemed to agree about was that when, eventually, I had my day in court it was likely to be a short, bittersweet experience and that the main topic of discussion would be the manner of my subsequent execution.

The House on Haight Street is a novella featuring Miranda Sullivan and Joe Calleja, culled from material originally included in the body of Warsaw Concerto (Book 13 of the Timeline 10/27/62 series). It did not make the "final cut" for two reasons: Firstly, I thought it was one sub-strand too many and therefore interrupted the flow of the rest of the narrative; and secondly, the book was getting very long even by my standards!

Guy Winter and his faithful sergeant, George Ransom, are heading for the English Midlands, where on a country estate a few miles south of Coventry, Helen Chase, the nation's most famous actress, has been grievously wounded in an apparent orgy of mindless violence that has claimed several other lives in the most bizarre and gruesome of circumstances.

The British Empire has sleepwalked, unprepared into war with the Triple Alliance, the Spanish colonies of the Caribbean and Central America. But this is not to be a war like those which have gone before it; wars decided by crushing British sea power and eventually, on land by the superiority of the logistics and tactics of relatively small colonial armies in the South Western badlands. Remember Brave Achilles becomes the call to arms.

It is the late spring of 1978 in a world in which the American Revolution failed in 1776 after George Washington was killed and the Continental Army was destroyed at the Battle of Long Island. The rumbling aftershocks of the Empire Day atrocities which reverberated through Two Hundred Lost Years are threatening to come to the boil. While in Philadelphia the politics become ever more fractious in Spain the Royal Alcazar is a citadel besieged in a country which might as well still be stuck in the 19th century.

This box set puts together Book 1 and 2 of the series - Interlopers and Pictures of Lily - in a single accessible volume.

It is November 1963 - 13 months after the Cuban Missile Crisis went horribly wrong. In this timeline the swinging sixties are not going to happen and the survivors, far from counting their blessings are beginning to wonder exactly what sort of world they have created.

Exhausted and tormented by his own demons, Adam Chantrey discovers, amidst the chaos of war and loss, love and an unlikely inner peace up on the high wold of Lincolnshire while all around him the world is enveloped in madness. Bomber Command's hour of greatest trial - the Battle of Berlin - is approaching, and its long, dark shadow hangs over the young men who ride the heavies of the Main Force to Germany in the knowledge that a tour of bomber operations is a death sentence for two out of every three men.

In the terrible "big picture" of the bombing war, Bielefeld suffered less than many places in Germany. Bielefeld was not - quite - wrecked from end to end; for Hannah Martin’s grandmother, that was no consolation because everything with which she had grown up was destroyed, and her father, the painter, was lost in the fire.

Christy was the most famous American painter of the Jazz Age, a time when an elite brotherhood of New York artists dominated the publishing world. Christy had eclipsed all of them with his "Christy Girl", an idealized woman who redefined beauty, influenced fashion, and inspired generations of women. In Romantic Illusions, Christy once again comes to life through the eyes of Nancy Palmer. Christy, his wife and former model, as she recounts her first Christmas with Howard and his family at his Ohio mansion, the Barracks, in 1912.

In Winter's Spy, the Mystery Man is under arrest, suspected of having been an enemy agent for his whole career in the Metropolitan Police and throughout all his years working for MI5. Dammed by the evidence of a German spy whom he encountered in Paris before the war, it seems as if he must literally fight for his life. Then, transported to Camp 020, MI5’s South London interrogation center, and confronted by his accuser, the Mystery Man begins to suspect that nothing is quite what it seemed.