COURAGE

From the bestselling authors of Broken Lives, Both Feet In, The Fearless Fifteen and Lions and Foxes comes a new exploration of what it actually means to be brave.

In Courage, Colonel the Right Honourable Bob Stewart DSO and Quentin Drummond Anderson take listeners across centuries and continents in search of an answer — from a submarine crew disarming live bombs beneath their own feet, to a nurse who refused to leave a besieged fortress, to a pilot who kept flying a powerless airliner through the night sky. Some of these stories are famous. Many are not. All of them ask the same question: what does a person do in the moment when fear says stop, and something else says go anyway?

Stewart brings the authority of a soldier who commanded UN forces in Bosnia and witnessed the crimes of men like Ratko Mladić firsthand. Anderson brings the eye of a writer determined to find courage not just on famous battlefields, but in family drawers, old photographs, and citations nobody had read in eighty years. Together, they uncover extraordinary lives hiding inside their own families — a chapter that grew, story by story, from two decorated relatives to seven, including one MC recommendation believed lost for decades.

From the Warsaw Ghetto to 7 October, from Bomber Command to Dien Bien Phu, from a besieged Ukrainian steelworks to the trenches of the First World War, Courage refuses easy definitions. It insists that courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision to act in spite of it — and that the people who show it are rarely saints. They are flawed, ordinary, human, and it is precisely for that reason that their choices matter.

Featured in the Daily Telegraph and on television, Courage is both a rigorously researched work of history and a deeply personal act of remembrance — a book that asks listeners to look more closely, not only at the famous names history has kept, but at the quieter courage waiting in their own families, if only someone thinks to look.