Search

“At about 11:30 on a Sunday morning in 1815, a few shots rang out as the curtain-raiser to one of Europe’s most titanic military clashes. By late afternoon, at the close of the Battle of Waterloo, nearly 40,000 men lay dead or wounded. Until that day, the army of Napoleon Bonaparte had seemed almost invincible. Indeed, […]

“At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the life of a petty tyrant in an obscure corner of the Ottoman Empire became the stuff of legend. What propelled this cold-blooded archetype of Oriental despotism, grandly known as the Lion of Ioannina and the Balkan Napoleon, into the consciousness of Western rulers and the general public? […]

“In this book, historian John Mollo describes the conception, gestation, birth and adolescence of the first British Regiments of Hussars – the byproducts of the Prince Regent’s passion for military finery and dandyism – leading on to their full maturity in the grim realities of war in the Iberian Peninsula between 1808 and 1814, first […]

“When the French declared war on Great Britain in 1793, they undermined the chosen policy of William Pitt, which had been to avoid conflict in order to repair the nation’s finances. The result of this policy was an understrength and inadequately resourced army. Whether campaigning on the continent in coalition with other European powers or […]

From the publishers: “The story of HMS Bellerophon is a record of the many and varied duties which the Royal Navy had to carry out in the period 1793 – 1815. It was involved in the first great fleet action of the War and was involved in the last moments of the struggle with the […]

On Saturday 5 May 2018, in the village of Marches, near Chambéry (South-Eastern France), the names of 27 local soldiers killed in action were finally honoured after two centuries of obscurity when a memorial plaque was installed next to the existing war memorial in the village. The names of these 27 young men, who gave […]

“This biography of John Jervis, who became Admiral Lord Vincent, makes compelling reading. It throws an oblique light on Nelson’s personality. St Vincent, who was born twenty-three years before Nelson, and survived for eighteen years after Trafalgar, fundamentally influenced the younger man’s career despite the two men being diametrically different characters. Yet without him, Nelson’s […]

An account of the life and times of Admiral John Child Purvis, who was a contemporary naval officer of Nelson. His ability as a fighting commander was proved in a bloody duel between his sloop-of-war and a French corvette during the War of American Independence. As a battleship Captain, he was the first British officer […]