Allan Mallinson

Four ways to win Waterloo

If you want Sharpe-like drama, go for Bernard Cornwell. For Eurocentric revisionism, go for Tim Clayton. If you’re short of time, there’s Brendan Simms’s 80 pager. But in a class of its own is former soldier Robert Kershaw making ‘order out of disorder’

The charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo by the British-American artist Richard Caton Woodville. From A History of War in 100 Battles by Richard Overy (William Collins, £25) 
issue 25 October 2014

  • Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

    Bernard Cornwell

    William Collins, pp. 348

  • Waterloo: Four Days That Changed Europe’s Destiny

    Tim Clayton

    Little Brown, pp. 588

  • 24 Hours at Waterloo

    Robert Kershaw

    W.H.Allen, pp. 421

  • The Longest Afternoon

    Brendan Simms

    W.H.Allen, pp. 160

The Kaiser’s war deprived Britain of her centenary celebrations of the victory at Waterloo. It also set the propagandists something of a challenge, for the Kaiser himself had sent an aide-de-camp to the British embassy the day after the declaration of war deploring ‘the action of Great Britain in joining with other nations against her old allies at Waterloo’.

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