Allan Mallinson
Ruling the Waves
Admirals: The Naval Commanders Who Made Britain Great
By Andrew Lambert
Faber & Faber 492pp £20 order from our bookshop
This is a timely book, in that Britain’s naval future is in debate – or rather, should be in debate. Commentators speak of a ‘sea blindness’ in politicians and opinion formers – an inability to realise the importance, in terms of threat and potential, that the watery covering of the planet represents to an island nation on the edge of Europe and the Atlantic with worldwide economic, social and political interests. After the astonishing, deeply humiliating and profoundly disturbing incident of HMS Cornwall’s sailor-hostages in the Arabian Gulf in 2007, the Defence Secretary, Des Browne, said of the Royal Navy’s reputation: ‘Because [it] is hard won, it is not easily undermined.’ He was, of course, utterly wrong. Not only did that failure – from the very bottom to the very top of the Navy – have grave strategic repercussions, it revealed serious systemic problems that have still not been confronted (for all HMS Cumberland’s recent despatch of Somali pirates).
Andrew Lambert is widely considered to be the country’s foremost naval historian. Admirals is as much a history of the Royal Navy – how the reputation of which the Defence Secretary spoke was indeed hard won – as it is of the remarkable men whose vision and powers of command
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
We've extended our February offer for a week, meaning you can still get a six-month subscription for only £19.99.
Click below for details.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/literaryfebruary/
'McCarthy’s portrayal of a cosmos fashioned by God for killing and exploitation, in which angels, perhaps, are predators and paedophiles, is one that continues to haunt me.'
@holland_tom on reading Blood Meridian in the American west (£).
https://literaryreview.co.uk/devils-own-country
'Perhaps, rather than having diagnosed a real societal malaise, she has merely projected onto an entire generation a neurosis that actually affects only a small number of people.'
@HoumanBarekat on Patricia Lockwood's 'No One is Talking About This'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/culturecrisis