Few military leaders have been as successful or as flamboyant as Maurice Marshal de Saxe, who reigned supreme in the tangled wars that raged across Europe during the early-Eighteenth Century. In this pithy biography, Edmund d’Auvergne traces the ascent of the future marshal from his lowly roots as an illegitimate son of Augustus II of Poland. He fought in many uniforms, serving the Army of the Holy Roma Empire, Imperial Army and most famously at the head of the French Army. Winning many battles in his career, he is best remembered for winning the decisive battle of Fontenoy which established French supremacy in the War of Austrian Succession.

During World War I, Oxford-trained archeologist Lawrence of Arabia used his knowledge of the Middle East to help organize the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. In this entertaining and insightful book, Jason Ridler profiles the intellectuals, outsiders, and eccentrics who followed in Lawrence’s footsteps across the next hundred years of warfare and who relied on creativity, curiosity, and outside-the-box thinking to shape battlefields from World War II and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. They were Ivy Leaguers and Oxford scholars, anthropologists and archeologists, an ad executive, an international activist, a Peace Corps veteran, an émigré journalist (and former teenage member of the French Resistance), a diplomat—mavericks and oddballs, men and women—who, not always heralded or heeded and sometimes hated, challenged traditional military thought and helped win wars, secure peace, and change the face of modern war.

Extensively illustrated with 52 detailed campaign and battle maps and diagrams, this book, originally published in 1990, surveys the evolution of warfare in Europe from Napoleon to the end of the twentieth century and in Asia from the Middle Ages. It considers the interaction of technology and warfare. With wide-ranging examples, the book includes two in depth case studies, one on the Soviet Operational Manoeuvre Group and its predecessors in the Russian Imperial Army, the other on the history of land warfare, including guerilla warfare, in Asia. In this book the author demonstrates that military history can be of immense practical help to the modern military analyst and professional. Now updated with a new introduction to take into account changes since 1990, this book remains of essential value to students, teachers & professionals in political & social history, international relations, defence, war & peace studies.