Blog Archives
sYears ago, reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, this passage on the Vandals excited my imagination: “The Vandals, who in twenty years had penetrated from the Elbe to Mount Atlas, were united under the command of their warlike king; and he reigned with equal authority over the Alani, who had passed within […]
It is dangerous to methodically go through the military history section of Hamilton Books. It is irresistable when coming across some fairly new title drastically marked down. One recent addition from my last order is Levi Roach’s Empires of the Normans. Pegasus Books, August 2022, 301 pages, hardback. Originally priced $29.95, $7.95 at Hamilton Books. […]
Osprey Publishing’s Men-at-Arms booklet Italian Colonial Troops 1882-1960 is #544 in the series. Published in 2022, author: Gabriele Esposito, artist: Giuseppe Rava. Forty eight pages including eight color plates. Italy like Germany got into the colony business later than Great Britain, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. Italians had moved into Tunisia across the Mediterranean Sea […]
Osprey Publishing’s Celtic Warrior is #30 in the Warrior series. It is a 64 page booklet written by Stephen Allen and illustrations by Wayne Reynolds including 10 color plates. The book is laid out similar to the Pictish Warrior booklet. Allen has eight pages on introduction and short history of the Celts. Eleven pages are […]
Osprey Publishing’s Pictish Warrior AD 297-841 is number 50 in their Warrior series originally published in 2002. Author is Paul Wagner with illustrations by Wayne Reynolds. The Picts are an enigmatic people of the British Isles first mentioned in 297 A.D., a regional power until succumbing from hammer blows from the Scots and Vikings. Robert […]
The Normans in Italy 1016-1194 by Raffaele D’Amato and Andrea Salimbeti from 2020 is a fairly recent addition from Osprey Publishing. This is the latest addition to volumes on the Normans. Terence Wise wrote Saxon, Viking, and Norman (Men-at-Arms # 85, 1979) and David Nicolle wrote The Normans (Elite #5, 1987). The Normans in Italy […]
I think I first heard of the Numidians when I read Harold Lamb’s Hannibal. That happened to be the first Harold Lamb I ever read. You used to run across the Bantam paperback editions of Lamb in used bookstores on a regular basis. Hannibal is also one of Lamb’s better histories as the the details […]
The French Foreign Legion is a military outfit with a lot of history around it and some legend. I can remember seeing movies about the FFL growing up. The one I remember best is the 1966 remake of Beau Geste starring Dean Stockwell, Doug McClure, Telly Savalas, and Leslie Nielsen. I read pulp writer Wyatt […]
I have a fascination with the U.S. Army between WW1 and WW2. I return to Brian McAllister Linn’s Guardians of Empire periodically. One of my favorite histories of the U.S. Army in WW2 is Geoffrey Perret’s There’s a War to be Won. That book covers the interwar period and development of things like the 105 […]
One of Robert E. Howard’s epic historical poems is “An Echo From the Iron Harp.” The poem gained some wide exposure as “The Gold and the Grey” included by Glenn Lord in The Book of Robert E. Howard (Zebra Books) in 1976. According to the Howardworks website, Glenn gave the poem the title as “The […]
A few weeks back, I mentioned Victor Davis Hanson’s The Second World Wars at the end of my review of Stalin’s War. One of the local library branches has it and I have since read it. The Second World Wars is from 2017 and is 653 pages including the index. The subtitle is “How the […]
I have read a lot of World War 2 history. Recently, I have been researching the armies of the 1930s of Italy, France, Japan, and the Soviet Union. The reason: writer Robert E. Howard made a prediction of inevitable wars to H. P. Lovecraft in a letter from January 1932. I have seen predictions within […]