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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Better Researched on Military than Society,
By
This review is from: Age of Elegance, 1812-22 (Hardcover)
This is the last volume in the author's series on the British during the wars with France. As such, his emphasis really is on the military and naval expeditions and the peace conferences. Those chapters I found easier reading than most military science books, so I certainly recommend it if you are wanting to get acquainted with the Peninsular campaign. He does fairly slight the war in the east against Napoleon, because the British weren't in it. I was particularly impressed with his attention to the details of what life was like for officers and men between battles, something usually skipped in the concentration on strategy and tactics. If this were all it attempted to cover, I would give it four stars.
His chapters on life in England at the time, especially the festivities around the allied sovreigns after victory, seem essentially good in their description of the countryside, the towns, and the people. However, I noted that his descriptions of some notables of London society were built on common myths of them, rather than better researched fact. Most especially, his handling of Brummell (my present object of research) struck me as so thoroughly apocryphal, built on later Brummelliana rather than actual memoirs of the man, that it made me wary of accepting the author's information on anyone around him. A book you can only use once you have researched in other books for confirmation everything it says, is an unnecessary detour. For the reader interested in the view of England, I could only give it two stars for insecurity, and recommend that you hunt down Priestly's 'Prince of Pleasure,' 1969 instead. There are NO illustrations in 'The Age of Elegance', except a few battle maps, indicative of the real emphasis of the 400+ pages. At the end, I felt I had picked up an excellent milsci book half the size that had been padded out with the peacetime/home front chapters that are less focused and less deeply researched in original materials. The author's style is easy and fluid in the military chapters, without technical gobbledegook: again, excellent for a deep introduction. The other half of the book reads like a compilation of newspaper clippings rewritten by him, as it zooms over the surface of so many subjects, from rural housholds to the supposed mind of this great man or that in reaction to conditions (I distrust his opinions here, as superficial).
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