Heyer, Georgette. An Infamous Army.

London: Heinemann, 1937.

Heyer is best known for her several dozen light and humorous romances set in Regency England, but she also was capable of far deeper and more complex historical writing. Before Heyer, the best known and most highly regarded fictional account of the Battle of Waterloo was in Thackeray’s classic Vanity Fair. (Victor Hugo wrote about the battle, too, in Les Misérables, but he was writing from the French viewpoint.) More recently, Bernard Cornwell, justifiably famous for his rousing and highly accurate battle scenes, did a marvelous grunt’s-eye view of the battle in Sharpe’s Waterloo. So how does this novel fair, compared to those?

Cornwell, Bernard. The Pale Horseman.

NY: HarperCollins, 2006.

Young Uhtred of Northumbria, ejected from his birthright, and having been raised by the Danes though he’s technically Anglo-Saxon, has developed into a fearsome warrior, the sort of fighter who has found a home in the shield wall. In the climactic battle of the previous volume (this is the second in the series), he killed Ubbe, one of the three Lothbrok brothers whose invasion of England has conquered three of the island’s four kingdoms, leaving only Wessex under the decidedly non-warrior-like Alfred to maintain the possibility of an English nation.

Morillo, Stephen (ed). The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations.

Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1996.

I have a longstanding interest in early medieval Europe and the Norman conquest of England (it wasn’t a cultural invasion at the beginning, simply a military campaign) comes right at the end of that period, just before the introduction of feudalism and chivalry and all that. I also have a strong background in military history, so I’ve naturally read a good deal about the Battle of Hastings over the years.

Bahmanyar, Mir. Vanquished: Crushing Defeats from Ancient Rome to the 21st Century.

Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2009.

In most books that are collections of important military engagements, the attention is on the winners — key battles almost always have a clear winner — and how they got there. This one is different; the focus is on not only the losers, but on those armies and commanders whose loss of a fight was so dramatic and all-encompassing, it changed things completely for the losing side.