Military

Half a century after the drama of Verdun, Alistair Horne describes the Paris meeting of two of the battle heroes, Eugen Radtke and Gustave Durassie.

C.R. Boxer portrays a key moment in the Thirty Years War. Dutch fortunes were not prospering when Piet Heyn revived his compatriots’ spirits by the daring capture of a Spanish treasure fleet.

David Woodward introduces Alfred von Tirpitz; the creator of the German High Seas Fleet, who was also the advocate of unrestricted submarine warfare.

S. Usher introduces Sallust, himself a disillusioned politician, who envisaged no future greatness for Rome until a single man of vision should have restored the old Republican sense of obligation—the individual's obligation to the state, and the state’s obligation to the world at large.

H. Hookham introduces Augustus F. Lindley, a contemporary and opponent of General Gordon’s, who served the Taipings during their nineteenth century rebellion against the Manchu dynasty.

Robert Cecil describes how, despite the blandishments of commissions from Philadelphia, and the exercise of force by the Continental Congress, Canada chose to remain separate in the 1770s.

Townsend Miller describes the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon, issued in Spain’s greatest century and accomplished amid civil war and in spite of foreign intervention.

Among military adventurers who have served in India, Mildred Archer writes, none was more dashing than the half-Indian leader of the famous Irregular Cavalry Corps known as Skinner’s Horse.

Civil war was always the bane of the Italian city-states. E.R. Chamberlain describes how, at the end of the fourteenth century, it seemed that the whole peninsula might soon be re-united under a single man's control.

J.J. Saunders continues the story of the first, and perhaps the greatest, of Islam’s Commanders of the Faithful. The Caliph Omar, after triumphantly laying the foundations of the Arab Empire, fell to a Persian Christian assassin in the year 644.