The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
We used to joke at Staff College when the command appointments for exercises were being handed out that at least we couldn’t be asked to command the rear guard on Napoleon’s 1812 retreat from Moscow. Of all the military operations in history, it is hard to think of...
“Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you. I have fought a hundred battles for France and not one against her…. Soldiers! Fire!” The oft-quoted last words of Michel Ney, Marshal of France,...
It seems apt that the paperback edition of Andrew Lambert’s gripping analysis in No More Napoleons should be published as Britain’s contribution to the preservation of the security of the continent of Europe, and indeed the wider world, is under debate and our very...
Andrew Lambert, in No More Napoleons, you describe Britain’s strategy between 1815 and 1914 as “book-ended by existential total wars”. What prompted you to reconsider the 19th century not as an age of complacency, but instead a hundred years of vigilance? The tendency...
While it is often thought that British military engagement in northwestern Europe ended with Waterloo in 1815 and resumed, a century later, with the First World War in 1914 – with a few periods of invasion anxiety surfacing around the middle of the 19th century –the...
One of our most cherished and favourite authors, Gordon Corrigan, passed in the last week. Gordon was a soldier, broadcaster, historian and friend. He wrote, on a variety of periods and subjects, with both scholarship and style. He was one of our most popular guests...
Brian Williams, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? My father was a history teacher and one of my abiding memories of childhood is of him spreading a map out on the dinner party and showing me where Waterloo was. I had come home from a visit...
Books of 2025 from Aspects of HistoryZeb Baker-Smith Editor of Aspects of HistorySeven Rivers by Vanessa Taylor explores how humanity and waterways have shaped one another across millennia, offering vivid historical portraits of the Nile, Danube, Ganges, Thames,...
Books Click on any of the books covers below to either buy or get more information on Amazon Articles Click on the links below to read the full article [dpdfg_filtergrid custom_query="advanced" use_taxonomy_terms="on" multiple_taxonomies="name_of_author"...
Thomas Messel, what first attracted you to the period or periods you work in? The focus of my study was a late eighteenth-century ancestor called Elizabeth Linley. I was aware that she eloped with and married the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but initially, I...
