Military History Today

Jeremy Black calls for a more wide-ranging, inclusive approach to the history of warfare.

‘Drums and trumpets’ history, offering a narrative account of battles and campaigns, much of it written for a general readership, is flourishing. While much of this popular work – Andrew Gordon on Jutland, for example, or Rory Muir on Salamanca – is thoughtful and first-rate, all too often it has a narrow focus and is somewhat familiar. Thus, in the Reader’s Guide to Military History , one of the most commercially successful of recent works, Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad (1998), is described as offering ‘nothing in the way of new insights or analysis’.

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