Irish Brigades Abroad examines the complete history of the Irish regiments in France, Spain, Austria and beyond. Covering the period from King James II's reign of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1685, until the disbandment of the Irish Brigades in France and Spain, this book looks at the origins, formation, recruitment and the exploits of the Irish regiments, including their long years of campaigning from the War of the Grand Alliance in 168...

Spain 1808. A remarkable debut novel, Napoleon's Blackguards introduces Captain James Ryan - brutally courageous, but haunted by the horrors of war - wanted by the British for his part in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, he escapes to France and joins Napoleon's Irish Legion. The Irish unit's reputation as the most hard-fighting and ill-disciplined unit in the French Army has been hard-earned, for they comprise a motley crew of blackguards, deserters, and others escaping the long hand of the law,...

Spain 1808. A remarkable debut novel, Napoleon’s Blackguards introduces Captain James Ryan - brutally courageous, but haunted by the horrors of war - wanted by the British for his part in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, he escapes to France and joins Napoleon’s Irish Legion. The Irish unit’s reputation as the most hard-fighting and ill-disciplined unit in the French Army has been hard-earned, for they comprise a motley crew of blackguards, deserters, and others escaping the long hand of the law,...

Spain 1808. A remarkable debut novel, Napoleon’s Blackguards introduces Captain James Ryan - brutally courageous, but haunted by the horrors of war - wanted by the British for his part in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, he escapes to France and joins Napoleon’s Irish Legion. The Irish unit’s reputation as the most hard-fighting and ill-disciplined unit in the French Army has been hard-earned, for they comprise a motley crew of blackguards, deserters, and others escaping the long hand of the law,...

Spain 1808. A remarkable debut novel, Napoleon’s Blackguards introduces Captain James Ryan - brutally courageous, but haunted by the horrors of war - wanted by the British for his part in the 1798 Irish Rebellion, he escapes to France and joins Napoleon’s Irish Legion. The Irish unit’s reputation as the most hard-fighting and ill-disciplined unit in the French Army has been hard-earned, for they comprise a motley crew of blackguards, deserters, and others escaping the long hand of the law,...

Redcoat is the brilliant story of the common British soldier from 1700 to 1900, based on the letters and diaries of the men who served and the women who followed them.Delving into the history of the period – charting events including Wolfe's victory and death at Quebec, Wellington's Peninsular War, Waterloo, the retreat from Kabul and the Sikh wars – celebrated military historian Richard Holmes provides a comprehensive portrait of a fallible but extraordinarily successful fighting ...

Most people know that Britain was invaded by the Romans, by the Vikings and by the Normans. Many will know about the Spanish Armada, launched by Philip II in 1588 to bring Protestant England to submission. But fewer people know that Philip launched a second armada in 1596 or that invasion plans were drawn up by the French in 1692, 1708, 1743, 1756, 1759, 1796 and 1801, and by the French together with the Spanish in 1779. In 1719, Spanish troops even landed in Scotland. Charles XII and Pete...

First published in 1949, 'Guerilla Days in Ireland' is an extraordinary story of the Irish War of Independence and the fight between two unequal forces, which ended in the withdrawal of the British from twenty-six counties. Seven weeks before the Truce of July 1921, the British presence in County Cork consisted of a total of over 12,500 men. Against these British forces stood the Irish Republican Army whose flying columns never exceeded 310 riflemen in the whole of the county. These flying...

The war declared by the Boers on 11 October 1899 gave the British, as Kipling said, 'no end of a lesson'. The public expected it to be over by Christmas, but it proved to be the longest (two and three-quarter years), the costliest (over £200 million), the bloodiest (at least 22,000 British, 25,000 Boer and 12,000 African lives) and the most humiliating war that Britain fought between 1815 and 1914.Thomas Pakenham's was the first full-scale documentary history of the war to be attem...

For much of the First World War, the opposing armies on the Western Front were at a stalemate, with an unbroken line of fortified trenches stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. The Allied objective after the bloody Battle of the Somme drew to a close in November 1916 was to decisively break through the German 'Hindenburg Line' and engage the numerically inferior German forces in a war of movement. The Arras offensive was conceived to achieve this breakthro...

In this stimulating and original investigation of the decisive battles ofthe English Civil War, Malcolm Wanklyn reassesses what actually happened on the battlefield and as a result sheds new light on the causes of the eventual defeat of Charles I. Taking each major battle in turn - Edgehill, Newbury I, Cheriton, Marston Moor, Newbury II, Naseby, and Preston - he looks critically at contemporary accounts and at historians' narratives, explores the surviving battlegrounds and retells the sto...

Discover the ultimate chronicle of a nation.In this book, Alistair Moffat brings vividly to life the story of Scotland, from the dawn of prehistory through to the twenty-first century.Ambitious, richly detailed and highly readable, Scotland: A History From Earliest Times skilfully weaves together a dazzling array of fact and anecdote from a vast range of sources. The result is an imaginative, informative, balanced and varied portrait of Scotland, s...