Inside GMT Flash of Steel Playing at the World Dyson’s Dodecahedron Quest for Fun! Bruce Heard and New Stories CRRPG Addict Fantasy Cafe Lynn’s Book Blog Sitrep Hex and Violence Grumble Jones Banzai!! Dungeon Fantastic Gaming Ballistic Ravens N’ Pennies Let’s GURPS The Collaborative Gamer Don’t Forget Your BootsIt’s an act of hubris to be able to pronounce the ‘greatest’ anything, much less the ‘greatest’ knight, a class of people that was fairly large and existed over centuries, but it is certainly fair to say that William Marshal[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Medieval Spain is one of those subjects I would like to know more about, so a used copy of Menocal’s book on al-Andalus was an attractive purchase for me. It’s a little more limited than I would like, being more[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
William Manchester’s book is really an ode to his hero, Magellan. He’s not a bad hero to have, but I think Manchester gives him far too much credit. The real value however, is that Manchester is far more interested in[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Alexandria is one of the great success stories of the ancient world, being founded by Alexander the Great, and then spending the next several centuries as one of the great trading ports of the Mediterranean, as well as a center[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
MacCulloch’s book on the Protestant Reformation is a huge work on a huge subject. Everything you might expect is in here, and much, much, more. He starts with a fairly good overview of western Christianity at the end of the[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Adam Zomoyski starts his book by noting that there’s no truly adequate biography of King Stanisław II Poniatowski in any language, and his doesn’t measure up either. He figures Stanisław deserves two fairly large volumes to trace down every tangent[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Like a lot of people, ancient Egypt has always had a fascination for me, and being a history buff, I’ve picked up a decent amount of knowledge on the subject over the years. But, I’ve never had any one great[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
The second volume of Osprey’s New Vanguard books on medieval siege weapons is pretty much just like the first: Thompson’s gouache illustrations do a good job of showing some specific examples, while the text goes through variations on terminology and[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
My biggest regret about Reed Browning’s book on the War of the Austrian Succession is that he never wrote any other military history. His normal subject seems to be the British government of the early 18th Century, which is probably[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Preston’s book on the last Jacobite Rebellion is an interesting volume. It looks for balance not by stripping away all romanticism or propaganda, but by embracing them. What papers and people were saying on both sides is looked at, not[…]↓ Read the rest of this entry…