Major-General Lord Andrew Thomas Blayney although previously a successful commander of his own regiment the 89th Regiment of Foot of the British through-out the early stages of the Peninsular war, he is best known for his narrative of events after his capture by Polish forces fighting under the flag of Napoleonic France. Blayney was the leader of an ill-fated Anglo-Spanish force which was assigned the task of attacking from Cadiz toward Malaga, culminating the battle of Fuengirola on 15th October 1810. Outnumbering his Polish foes by a huge margin, a series of unfortunate accidents on the allied side and brave and heroic resistance on the Polish side led to a debacle and his capture. It should be noted that this was far from the only amphibious disaster led by the British in the Peninsular Wars that should throw further perspective on the victories of the main British army under Wellington. Blayney’s narrative along with some idiosyncratic spelling recounts his journey from Andulusia to Verdun in the north-east of France. During his journey from one outpost to another as a paroled prisoner he meets a number of famed French generals, as befitted his rank, such as Sébastiani, Kellermann, Belliard and even Marshal Bessiéres who treat him on the whole well. He winds his way through the countryside, and he tells many tales of the people and surroundings that he finds himself somewhat forcibly journeying through. The main strength of the narrative is the author’s eye to detail and his flair for recounting a tale, along with the real rarity of accounts from the point of view of an English prisoner of war. Published in two volumes this is the first volume.

So great is the weight of reading on the subject of the Waterloo campaign that it might be thought there is nothing left to say about it, and from the military viewpoint, this is very much the case. But one critical aspect of the story has gone all but untold the French home front. Little has been written about the topic in English, and few works on Napoleon or Revolutionary and Napoleonic France pay it much attention. It is this conspicuous gap in the literature that Charles Esdaile explores in this erudite and absorbing study. Drawing on the vivid, revealing material that is available in the French archives, in the writings of soldiers who fought in France in 1814 and 1815 and in the memoirs of civilians who witnessed the fall of Napoleon or the Hundred Days, he gives us a fascinating new insight into the military and domestic context of the Waterloo campaign, the Napoleonic legend and the wider situation across Europe.

From Napoleon's invasion of Portugal in 1807 to his final defeat at Waterloo, the English theatres played a crucial role in the mediation of the Peninsular campaign. In the first in-depth study of English theatre during the Peninsular War, Susan Valladares contextualizes the theatrical treatment of the war within the larger political and ideological axes of Romantic performance. Exploring the role of spectacle in the mediation of war and the links between theatrical productions and print culture, she argues that the popularity of theatre-going and the improvisation and topicality unique to dramatic performance make the theatre an ideal lens for studying the construction of the Peninsular War in the public domain. Without simplifying the complex issues involved in the study of citizenship, communal identities, and ideological investments, Valladares recovers a wartime theatre that helped celebrate military engagements, reform political sympathies, and register the public’s complex relationship with Britain’s military campaign in the Iberian Peninsula. From its nuanced reading of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Pizarro (1799), to its accounts of wartime productions of Shakespeare, description of performances at the minor theatres, and detailed case study of dramatic culture in Bristol, Valladares’s book reveals how theatrical entertainments reflected and helped shape public feeling on the Peninsular campaign.

Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.