Search Results

“... A recent bibliographical review of the Spanish Armada concluded that at last the evidence available permitted definitive judgments on the episode from both sides. Such a long interval may be comforting to scholars but it will clearly not do for journalists, politicians and, above all, defence experts who are eager to derive immediate lessons from such an unexpected but valuable proving ground as the Falklands war ...”

“... At first glance Fire-Power may seem to be a professional study by gunners about gunners and for gunners, but if readers not privileged to have served in the Royal Regiment can absorb the technical information and diagrams they will learn a lot about the realities of warfare in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, they will appreciate the extent to which fire-power has dominated combat and what techniques have been evolved to exploit it and overcome it ...”

“... Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, who died in Marrakesh in March 1981 aged 96, retained to the end a touching faith that History would eventually vindicate him in the controversial aspects of his career. Almost alone among the Army commanders who survived the war, he took no part in the post-war battle of the memoirs, nor indeed was he particularly willing to disclose his private sentiments to interviewers ...”

“... When a marriage disintegrates in mutual misunderstanding and recrimination, it is no good looking to either partner – or to their families – for a complete and objective explanation. The analogy with sovereign states is, of course, far from exact, and anyway historians are trained to surmount nationalist bias. Nevertheless British and French historians of the tragic termination of their countries’ ‘affair’ in 1940 have in practice found it extremely difficult to write dispassionately, and even harder to interpret controversies sympathetically from the other’s viewpoint ...”

“... While walking down Sackville Street in London in 1942, Nicholas Jenkins’s attention was unequivocally demanded by the hurricane-like imminence of a thickset general, obviously of high rank, wearing enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. He had just burst from a flagged staff-car almost before it had drawn up by the kerb. Now he tore up the steps of the building at the charge, exploding through the inner door into the hall ...”

“... Numerous accounts, not least among them Ronald Lewin’s pioneering survey Ultra goes to war, have familiarised us with the remarkable story of Anglo-American achievements in breaking enemy codes and keeping their most valuable source of intelligence secret not just during the war but for thirty years afterwards. Yet, as both Basil Collier and Ronald Lewin stress in their new studies, neither British nor American intelligence services enjoyed high prestige or had much to boast about in the inter-war period ...”

“... taken), and in 1969 Angus Calder published The People’s War. In the meantime, Michael Howard and Brian Bond, at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, widened the dimensions of the military history taught there. In 1970 the ‘Fontana History of War and Society’ was launched (‘society’ meaning British or English society, rather ...”

“... made then. It is not a cheering book, but it is a strong and wholesome one, which fortifies Mr Bond’s place in the very top rank of the military-historical hierarchy. Britain, he firmly reminds us, meant, for its army, the British Empire and Commonwealth. It was Imperial, not Continental service that the Army’s basic organisation and recruiting method ...”

“... giving and our friends who are doing all the taking.’ The measure of Brooke himself is taken by Brian Bond, who does not question his greatness as a military leader, but convicts the editor of his diaries. Sir Arthur Bryant, of making extravagant claims. Bryant tried to make out that Alan Brooke, not Churchill, was the mastermind of British and Allied ...”

“... found some support among the new school of ‘War and Society’ historians such as Professor Brian Bond and the present writer, who argued that Haig’s faults were those of the old Army as a whole, and that the problems he faced had baffled European commanders with far greater experience than himself. Nevertheless the popular image remained that ...”

“... When France fell in the summer of 1940, practically all Arabs of the Levant were sure that the Axis would win the war. This would probably free their countries, Syria and Lebanon, from the French mandates under which they had lived resentfully since 1920. But then an Italian Armistice Commission turned up in Beirut (one of its members brought his grand piano ...”

“... over-acting whatever personae the powers-that-be have (it would seem) decreed that they pursue: Brian Clough complacent and sardonic, Jimmy Greaves wayward and impish, Mike Channon impetuous – or is it ‘coltishly inarticulate’? The worst of this lot is the bejewelled, coiffeured John Bond (I was gratified the other ...”

“... England v. Hungary encounter on 18 November. By the time you read me, anything might be happening. Brian Clough or Bob Stokoe or Elton John could be the new England manager, nursing bruised dreams for the World Cup in 1986. On the other hand, Sir Ron Greenwood might even now be contentedly inspecting the hotels in Bilbao, hoping to find a likely venue for the ...”

“... drive a truck at great speed down a narrowing alley. The vehicle is too tall for the James Bond ruse of tilting it at an angle. It stays level and finally gets stuck between the walls. The two men leap out and climb onto two waiting motorcycles. It was all planned. This is where the mind comes back, of course, and we might think the attraction of the ...”

“... be said to include all Durrell’s characters – those to whom he has given names. That is, the bond of naming proves stronger than merely human hatred or enmity. The novels span the years of the Second World War and the Nazi occupation of France, with Quinx supposedly set immediately after the war’s end. Extremes of murder, torture and insanity in the ...”