Richard Holmes
Bellicose and Brave
Warriors: Extraordinary Tales from the Battlefield
By Max Hastings
HarperCollins 384pp £20 order from our bookshop
Readers of Max Hasting’s most recent book, Armageddon, will not need reminding that long before becoming a newspaper editor he was a remarkably fine military historian. Having laid down the editorial red pencil he has returned to his first love, and we should be grateful for it. Warriors, as he declares at the very beginning, is concerned with people rather than things, and with men (and one woman) who actually do the business of battle. ‘Warriors’, he notes ‘are unfashionable people in democratic societies in periods of peace.’
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