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Books

Four ways to win Waterloo

If you want Sharpe-like drama, go for Bernard Cornwell. For Eurocentric revisionism, go for Tim Clayton. If you’re short of time, there’s Brendan Simms’s 80 pager. But in a class of its own is former soldier Robert Kershaw making ‘order out of disorder’

25 October 2014

9:00 AM

25 October 2014

9:00 AM

Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles Bernard Cornwell

William Collins, pp.348, £25, ISBN: 9780007539383

Waterloo: Four Days That Changed Europe’s Destiny Tim Clayton

Little Brown, pp.588, £25, ISBN: 9781408702482

24 Hours at Waterloo Robert Kershaw

W.H.Allen, pp.421, £25, ISBN: 9780753541425

The Longest Afternoon Brendan Simms

W.H.Allen, pp.160, £14.99, ISBN: 9780241004609

The Kaiser’s war deprived Britain of her centenary celebrations of the victory at Waterloo. It also set the propagandists something of a challenge, for the Kaiser himself had sent an aide-de-camp to the British embassy the day after the declaration of war deploring ‘the action of Great Britain in joining with other nations against her old allies at Waterloo’.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles £20; Waterloo: Four Days That Changed Europe’s Destiny £22.50; 24 Hours at Waterloo £20; The Longest Afternoon £12.99 Tel: 08430 600033

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