Book Review - Valentine Grey by Sandi Toksvig

The author is familiar to ABC viewers from a variety of British TV shows but she is much more well known in the UK. This is a story of a girl who was brought up in India with a degree of physical freedom unheard of for Victorian young ladies, who is sent to live in London after the death of her father. In London, she must live with restrictions on clothing and behaviour that she finds intolerable. Meanwhile, her cousin Reggie, is finding true love with another man, which was illegal at that time. She conceives a mad idea to take Reggie's place as a volunteer n the Boer War. Both Valentine and Reggie get what they want – only to find it wasn't really what they expected. A readable, illuminating and well researched offering. Wendy

Book Review - Beseiged: siege Warfare in the Ancient world by Duncan B. Campbell

This informative volume charts the development of strategies and equipment used in besieging towns and cities in the classical worlds of Greece and Rome. Ancient texts, archaeological finds and modern re-constructions of war engines are used to explain when and how they were used. Famous generals such as Hannibal, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great feature, with descriptions of their successful and unsuccessful attempts to subdue fortified towns. It was quite important for towns to defend themselves, because if they fell, the men were generally killed and the women and children enslaved by the victors. Filled with illustrations and extensively annotated. Wendy

action heroes!

Alex Rutherford continues a rich historical action adventure tradition with this fictionalised story of Babur, the Moghul emperor. The story begins with Babur inheriting his father's small kingdom in central Asia and follows him as he pursues his dream to emulate his ancestor Timur or Tamberlaine. Ranging through the countries of modern day Uzbekistan, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, Babur's armies face many trials before achieving success. I don't think this reaches the standard set by other historical action writers such as Conn Iggulden or Bernard Cornwell but it is an insight into a very different time and different cultures and very enjoyable escapism.

Wendy

Fire and Sword

Book 3 in Simon Scarrow's epic story of Napoleon and Wellington is another absorbing story. You can feel the suffering of the troops as they march, counter march, deal with low rations and impatient generals. The generals have to deal with non-military imterference into what they know they can achieve. The characters of the two men are developing as they move towards their Waterloo. Napoleon is starting to give into his megalomania viewing all others as subordinate to his visions. Wellington had a much slower rise to much less power and was required to do much more with much fewer resources. The battles are detailed in vivid descriptions so that you can imagine being one of the great generals and trying to decide where and when to commit your last reserves.

Wendy

Azincourt

Bernard Cornwell's masterly recreation of the battle of Agincourt, including the campaign that led up to it is personalised by the focus on Nicholas Hook. Nick has been drawing a bow since he was seven years old, building strength and skill.

"Hook had learned the whispering release that let the string slip through his fingers, which hardened into leather pads. and as he drew and released, drew and released, year after year, the muscles of his back, his chest and his arms grew massive. This was one requirement, the huge muscles needed to draw the bow, while the other, which was harder to acquire, was to forget the eye.
When he first started as a boy, Hook would draw the cord to his cheek and sight down the arrow's length to aim, but that cheated the bow of its full power. If a bodkin was to shear through plate armour it needed all the power of the yew and that meant drawing the cord to the ear, and then the arrow slanted across the eye, and it had taken Hook years to learn how to think the arrow to the target. He could not explain it, but no archer could. He only knew that when he drew the cord he looked at the target and the arrow flew there because he wanted it to, not because he had lined eye, arrow and target.
That was why the French had no archers other than a few huntsmen, because they had no men who had spent years learning to make a length of yew and a cord of hemp become part of themselves." ....... from page 134

War in 1415 is brutal and bloody so this book is not for the squeamish. Cornwell's gift for re-telling famous battles and military campaigns evidenced in his works on Wellington (the Sharpe Series) and the American Civil War (the Starbuck Chronicles) is in full flight here. 6,000 Englishmen (including a few Welshmen) beat a French army of 30,000 helped by the weather and the English longbow.

Interestingly, as an aside in his historical note at the end of the book, Cornwell theorises that as the French had threatened to cut off two fingers from the archers' hands to prevent them drawing the bow, that the English made rude gestures with those fingers at the French after they won the battle. Thus the origin of the infamous two fingered salute!

I love Cornwell's masterly evocation of the few men and women he focuses on to tell the story, his commmand of the details of daily life & military training and of course his strong, though flawed, heroes. Visit the author's website for more info on his works http://www.bernardcornwell.net/

Wendy