This book, like so much of the modern western population, is obese. It weighs three pounds one and a half ounces (1.4 kg) and runs to 1,148 pages. I read it in a series of closely connected long sessions, hoping thereby to retain the thread, but unfortunately there is not much of a thread to follow. Instead, a concentrated mass of information, much of it of gripping interest, is presented in a bewildering series of disjointed chronological, geographical and systematical sequences.
Sir Michael Howard, himself an expert aficionado in this subject, states in his encomium printed on the dust jacket that the book is ‘definitive’, that the author has ‘trawled through all the documentation’ and that he has interviewed ‘all the survivors’. ‘Definitive’ — hardly; Holt himself observes there is still much material to be discovered. ‘All the documentation’ — well, a very great deal of it. ‘All the survivors’ — quite possibly. Basically, how- ever, Howard is right in the sense that another work on this subject, of this authority and on this scale is unlikely ever to be undertaken.
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