Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory - Softcover

Farwell, Byron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393305333 ISBN 13: 9780393305333

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988

Synopsis

This book brings together the lives of eight of Queen Victoria's most renowned and idiosyncratic generals, men who helped create the British Empire and whose lives reflect the vigor and diversity of the age.

They are: Hugh Gough, Charles Napier, Charles Gordon, Frederick Roberts, Garnet Wolseley, Evelyn Wood, Hector Macdonald, and Herbert Kitchener.

About this title

About the Author:

During the Second World War, Byron Farwell (1921–1999) served as a captain of engineers attached to the Mediterranean Allied Air Force in the British Eighth Army area.

Review:

“[Mr. Farwell] reminds us how much of history has always been about war. The figures he etches are Horatio Alger types with epaulets, conventional men whom luck and daring raised to unconventional situations. . . . Sparely but convincingly, Mr. Farwell conveys a sense of the society they worked in, one that tolerated eccentricity and excess but not transgressions of its male mythology―in which riding and religion were crucial, along with laudanum and chloral and stoic hardihood. Those who shun analyses and learned footnotes, preferring a thundering tale well told―or rather eight of them―should not miss this book.”
- Eugen Weber, New York Times Book Review

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0393305333
• ISBN 13: 9780393305333
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368