This week's new books

Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, Robert M. Edsel (Preface Publishing)
From D-Day to VE-Day, 65 members of the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives section (MFAA) of the Allied armed forces fought to preserve Europe and the world’s cultural heritage. This is the story of eight of these men in the forward operating theatre and their struggle to save hundreds of damaged buildings and find millions of cultural items before they were destroyed by the Nazis.

Titian: The Last Days, Mark Hudson (Bloomsbury)
A history of Titian and his work which explores the physical and spiritual landscape of his last paintings, many of which he never completed, and considers the artist’s relationship with his artistic rivals, his patrons and his troubled dealings with his own family.

Community and identity: The making of modern Gibraltar since 1704, Stephen Constantine (Manchester University Press)
A study of the history of Gibraltar following its military conquest in 1704, which focuses on the civilian population of the British colony and examines how the demographic, economic, administrative and political history of Gibraltar accounts for the construction of a distinctive ‘Gibraltarian’ identity.

The Guernsey Merchants and their world, Gregory Stevens Cox (Toucan Press, Guernsey)
A study of 18th-century Guernsey merchants, which included indigenous aristocrats, Huguenot refugees and economic migrants, which places the merchants in their context and considers the trade, cargoes, shipping, networks and the geography of their mercantile world.