PRICE OF VICTORY: A NAVAL HISTORY OF BRITAIN 1815-1945 (HB)

At the end of the French and Napoleonic wars, British sea-power was at its apogee. But by 1840, as one contemporary commentator put it, the Admiralty was full of ‘intellects becalmed in the smoke of Trafalgar’. How the Royal Navy reformed and reinvigorated itself in the nineteenth century is just one thread in this magnificent book, which refuses to accept standard assumptions and analyses. Based on a lifetime’s learning, it is the culmination of one of the most significant British historical works in recent decades.