This is a collection of excerpts designed to get you buying the larger works. The review I gave it on Amazon (4 stars) follows.
The article on Churchill and the Navy in WWI by Freeman was quite interesting and well written. It is interesting to see how Great Britain drifted into the Great War while their attention was focused on Home Rule in Ireland.
I very much liked APJ Taylor's "Warlords: Churchill" excerpt. It is well written and and full of information.
'Titans: Zhukov" didn't do much for me. If you don't know much about this Soviet general and want a short intro, fine. But I know who he is and what he did. It was short.
"Deserters" by Charles Glass is a fine piece of writing about something rarely covered – the 150,000 deserters from the US and UK-Commonwealth forces in Europe in WWII. It discusses the variety of reasons that people deserted and the varied fates they met – only one being executed.
The article about Kursk was OK, nothing special.
I rather liked the piece on Germanicus, the skilled Roman general who fathered Caligula.
I've not read any Bulldog Drummond stories before and won't be in the future based on the one here. This doesn't seem to fit into a history or military category. I'm not sure if Bulldog Drummond is a satire of the hard-boiled detective genre or just a bad example of it.
I was very impressed with Patrick Mercer's "Doctor Watson's War". This well written piece is about Dr. Watson (of the Sherlock Holmes stories) and his pre-Homes adventures as a doctor in the British army. He takes part in the disaster of Maiwand, when a British column was over-run by Afghan regulars and tribesmen. Watson and his aides have to make their way through a gauntlet of threats. Watson then suffers from what we today would call PTSD. It all sounds plausible, without a super-hero protagonist required. I didn't know about this author before but will be looking for his work from now on.
