Fascinating... clear and concise... important. It is hard to see this book being bettered in the near future

I learned a lot

This is no mere paperback edition of Mallinson's acclaimed 2009 hardback. He presents a revised and updated version that no self-respecting defense commentator can risk being without

A compelling history of the British Army

Mallinson is surely right to stress the one enduring quality of the British Army: 'operational resilience'

Precise and profound

Lucid, absorbing

The numerous fans of her Aristocrats (in which number I include myself) will not be disappointed: here is the same judicious mixture of intimacy and scholarship

A Royal Affair is an entertaining tale ...Tillyard's account of the brothers is heroic...[she] tells this astonishing tale with bravura

She has returned to what she knows-and does-best, teasing out the bonds of love, hate and pretend indifference that bind siblings, no matter what their historical pedigree, into a cat's cradle of consequence

The story is brilliantly told. In its descriptive flourishes it is sometimes fearlessly novelistic, yet it travels long distances for scholarly scruples