There can be little doubt that the export of opium from India to China by, among others, the Honourable East India Company is hard to condone. Indeed, Mark Simner makes the point that the trade was always kept quiet in Britain and, to a lesser extent, China.
Books
REVIEW – Panzer Commander Hermann Balck: Germany’s master tactician
Hermann Balch has been described as the ‘greatest German general no one ever heard of’. Stephen Robinson, a graduate of the Australian Command and Staff College, has attempted to address this paradox, but with only partial success.
REVIEW – Trinity: the treachery and pursuit of the most dangerous spy in history
Neil Faulkner reviews this compelling biography of Klaus Fuchs, a brilliant academic physicist and refugee from Nazi Germany, who has been described as both ‘the spy of the century’ and ‘the most dangerous spy in history’.
REVIEW – The Vietnam War: an intimate history
By the time the Viet Cong flag was being raised across Saigon on 30 April 1975, the United States had spent the best part of 30 years conducting a programme of sustained financial, political, and military assaults against Vietnam in order to prevent the country from becoming a Communist state.
REVIEW – Normandy ’44: D-Day and the Battle for France
The truth is that the Normandy Campaign was a vast enterprise, of engineering, logistics, strategy, and planning, but it was also, once under way, driven by events that could not be foreseen.
REVIEW – The British are coming: the war for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775 – 1777
With his description of the events at Portsmouth, Atkinson once again justifies a New York Times review of a previous volume which described his work as ‘a tapestry of fabulous richness and complexity… Atkinson is a master of what might be called “pointillism history”, assembling the small dots of pure colour into a vivid, tumbling narrative…’.
REVIEW – Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill, and the road to war
Tim Bouverie’s Appeasing Hitler strides boldly and confidently through a decade of British political and diplomatic history. Such history could be dull, but not in the hands of Bouverie, whose narrative is tense and written with great verve.
REVIEW – 24 Hours at Balaclava, 25 October 1854: Voices from the Battlefield
It was less a pitched battle than a succession of accidental collisions; less a decisive trial of strength than a momentary eruption of episodic violence that changed nothing and settled nothing.
REVIEW – Arnhem: the complete story of Operation Market Garden, 17 – 25 September 1944
William F Buckingham has written what may become the definitive British account of the Battle of Arnhem. In a crowded field, Buckingham’s meticulous reconstruction of the battle provides the reader with a detailed yet accessible narrative of those remarkable events of 75 years ago.
REVIEW – The American Military: a concise history
The American Military: a concise history is an essential introduction to the development of the US army. From the landing of the first English settlers at Jamestown to the protracted conflicts in the Middle East today, the book documents the key transformations that have occurred within the American armed forces over the centuries.
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