Tells all the old stories of imperial heroism con brio. Noel Annan, New York Review of Books

This is an upstairs-downstairs view of the Victorian-Edwardian army, one of the world's most peculiar fighting forces. The battles are household words, but the idiosyncracies and eccentricities of its soldiers and their often appalling living conditions are largely unrecorded.

Farwell provides profiles of eight Victorian military officers--men who helped create the British Empire and whose lives reflect the age. Photos.

The African front comprised a series of conflicts, schemes, maneuvers, heroics, disasters, inhospitable climate and geography, and insects--as the Allies sought to conquer four German colonies.

Finding Dr. Livingston was only one of many exploits in the remarkable life of the great African explorer Henry M. Stanley. In a narrative that reads like a novel, Byron Farwell tells the story of this complex man who made a major contribution o the world's knowledge. He describes his bitter childhood, his coming to America where he found a friend and a name, his service in the American Civil War, his African adventures, and his late but happy marriage.

Filled with interesting and often highly entertaining historical anecdotes, and there are some rare photographs and illustrations. . . . Lucid, well written. . . . A very sound contribution to our understanding of British Empire and South Asian history. Choice

"The stories are glorious and told with zest and verve." Washington Times

The charismatic Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, who began his military career in the Mexican War, earned his great fame in the Civil War in a series of brilliantly fought battles. He was given the name Stonewall at the First Battle of Bull Run, when his brigade faced overwhelming odds but held the line. Byron Farwell's engrossing narrative reveals Stonewall Jackson both as a military genius and as a quirky, dark personality radically different from the storybook version that grew up after Jackson's untimely death at Chancellorsville in 1863.

Within two weeks the French troops had mutinied, leaving the Western Front practically undefended. In the same month, Lenin arrived in Moscow on the heels of the Russian Revolution and vowed to make peace with Germany. To make matters worse, the Allies had reason to be dubious about the help they were receiving from across the Atlantic. The U.S. Army ranked sixteenth in the world (behind Portugal), and most of its soldiers were poorly trained. Byron Farwell's informed, stirring account describes not only how the United States turned the tide of the war but also how the war served as a...

The Great Boer War (1899 - 1902) more properly the Great Anglo-Boer War was one of the last romantic wars, pitting a sturdy, stubborn pioneer people fighting to establish the independence of their tiny nation against the British Empire at its peak of power and self-confidence. It was fought in the barren vastness of the South African veldt, and it produced in almost equal measure extraordinary feats of personal heroism, unbelievable examples of folly and stupidity, and many incidents of humor and tragedy. Byron Farwell traces the war s origins, the slow mounting of the British efforts to...