Rifles: Six Years with Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters by Mark Urban - review by Andrew Roberts

Andrew Roberts

Brothers In Arms

Rifles: Six Years with Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters

By

Faber & Faber 352pp £20
 

As THOUGH MARK Urban, the diploma tic editor of BBC2's Newsnight, did not have enough to do in his day job, he is fast carving out a second career for himself as a first-class military historian of the Napoleonic Wars. His recent biography of Wellington's Peninsular cryptographer, George Scovell, entitled The Man Who Broke Napoleon Codes, was critically acclaimed, and now he has followed it up with a history of the 95th Rifle.

Regiment   that is as dashing and unconventional as the legendary unit itself. There are plenty of myths about the 95th - the regiment that Berna rd Cornwell chose for the hero of his Peninsular War novels, Major Dick Sharpe - and Urban forensically dispatches the false ones and eagerly burnishes

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