For more than twenty years after 1793, the French army was supreme in continental Europe. How did Britain survive and eventually win a generation-long war against a regime which at its peak commanded many times the resources?
Roger Knight was Deputy Director of the National Maritime Museum until 2000, and now teaches at the Greenwich Maritime Institute at the University of Greenwich. The Pursuit of Victory- The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelsonwon the Duke of Westminster's Medal for Military History, the Mountbatten Award and the Anderson Medal of the Society for Nautical Research.
A wonderfully disorienting read ... for [Knight] the real heroes of
the struggle against Napoleon are not Wellington or Nelson or
Collingwood or Cochrane but the clerks and administrators and
'silent men of business' who put Britain's armies in the field and
kept her ships at sea and her allies in funds and ultimately won
the war ... there is scarcely a wasted sentence here, not a duff
page, not a chapter ... that does not bring you very close to the
realities of a total war
*Spectator*
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