Anthony Richardson

Sir Basil Edward Embry

The Story of Sir Basil Embry's Escape from Occupied France in the Summer of 1940

Wingless Victory

David Rissik

Iain Suthers

Healthy waterways and oceans are essential for our increasingly urbanised world. Yet monitoring water quality in aquatic environments is a challenge, as it varies from hour to hour due to stormwater and currents. Being at the base of the aquatic food web and present in huge numbers, plankton are strongly influenced by changes in environment and provide an indication of water quality integrated over days and weeks. Plankton are the aquatic version of a canary in a coal mine. They are also vital for our existence, providing not only food for fish, seabirds, seals and sharks, but producing oxygen, cycling nutrients, processing pollutants, and removing carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. This Second Edition of Plankton is a fully updated introduction to the biology, ecology and identification of plankton and their use in monitoring water quality. It includes expanded, illustrated descriptions of all major groups of freshwater, coastal and marine phytoplankton and zooplankton and a new chapter on teaching science using plankton. Best practice methods for plankton sampling and monitoring programs are presented using case studies, along with explanations of how to analyse and interpret sampling data. Plankton is an invaluable reference for teachers and students, environmental managers, ecologists, estuary and catchment management committees, and coastal engineers.

A Guide to Their Ecology and Monitoring for Water Quality

Plankton

WINGLESS VICTORY is the story of an audacious and desperate man on the run, the record of one of the first wartime escapes through Occupied France. It reads like a first-class thriller and, as one critic puts it, “leaves fiction gasping far behind.” On May 27, 1940, Wing-Commander Basil Embry (later Air Chief Marshal Sir Basil Embry, and Commander, Allied Air Forces in Central Europe 1953-56), although appointed to a higher command, decided to lead his old squadron into battle for the last time. Within the hour he was shot down in France and found himself alone, unarmed, and in uniform. Capture was inevitable. He was, in fact, captured three times, but refused to submit. Once he broke from a column of prisoners under the muzzle of a German machine-gun. Another time he fought his way out, killing three Germans with a stolen rifle and then hiding in a manure heap for nearly six hours. But perhaps the most amazing of all his exploits was the occasion on which, in the role of a fanatical member of the Irish Republican Army, he shook his fist under the nose of a German inquisitor, yelling hatred and abuse of Britain until his captors finally turned him loose to find his own way home. At this period there was little of escape technique to guide him and he had no opportunity to lay plans or prepare equipment. Yet, by sheer courage and wit, he found his way back to Britain to fight and fly again. He won the D.S.O. and three bars, and the D.F.C. “The author succeeds in communicating vividly, yet unpretentiously, the sensations of a man on the run....About ten times as exciting as a fictional thriller.”—Sunday Times “A thrilling and authentic escape story—will prove a classic.”—Daily Herald “The records of World War II have no wilder or stranger story to tell.”—Tatler “It is an extremely exciting story, but well spiced with humour as well.”—Illustrated London News

Anthony Richardson

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