A book on Waterloo as short as this (the text proper is 100 pages, small format) tempts a rush to judgment; it has certainly been widely acclaimed already. Paul Johnson’s dust-jacket puff says that the battle ‘is both one of the most decisive in history and the most difficult to describe’. Decisiveness is important: Waterloo is the first in a series called ‘Making History’. The editors, Amanda Foreman and Lisa Jardine, claim that ‘there are moments when a single event topples the most apparently certain of outcomes, when one intervention changes the course of history. They are the landmarks along the horizon of the past.’ Mercifully, Andrew Roberts’s prose is altogether less florid, and he tackles his subject with a very prudent degree of circumspection.

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