In the original dust jacket. Mauve cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean rare copy from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. 

Hard Cover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. First Edition. Harper & Brothers, 1942, First Edition, 8vo., 375 pages, map endpapers. A great read for history fans. Left on our own yet again to save the world. How history repeats itself. We had some superb fighting men and leaders when needed. The story is gripping and well told. I will require the follow up volumes in due course.

Review: In the first of his ‘Napoleonic trilogy’ Bryant produces a very readable narrative which describes, not only the political and economic story of the period, but also provides a window on the social forces at work in shaping the lives of the people of Britain. I did wonder whether a book written in 1942, by a historian who seems to have attracted a good deal of negative publicity, would provide the kind of read I was looking for.I was pleasantly surprised. There are some questionable statements and ‘facts’, but nothing to really spoil the experience. He describes George III as’a little man’ on several occasions. The context makes it clear that he is referring to physical stature. I had always understood George to be of at least average dimensions if not taller. It is a book written from the British perspective and he excoriates Bonaparte at every opportunity perhaps sometimes unfairly. Perhaps this approach is influenced by the times in which Bryant completed this work and his earlier, well publicised, relatively benign view of Hitler which he was, by the early 1940’s, trying to forget or compensate for. However If you are interested in this period of history this book is recommended.

Sir Arthur Wynne Morgan Bryant, CH, CBE (18 February 1899 – 22 January 1985) was an English historian, columnist for The Illustrated London News and man of affairs. His books included studies of Samuel Pepys, accounts of English eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and a life of George V. Whilst his scholarly reputation has declined somewhat since his death, he continues to be read and to be the subject of detailed historical studies. He moved in high government circles, where his works were influential, being the favourite historian of three prime ministers: Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee, and Harold Wilson. Bryant’s historiography was often based on an English romantic exceptionalism drawn from his nostalgia for an idealised agrarian past. He hated modern commercial and financial capitalism, he emphasised duty over rights, and he equated democracy with the consent of “fools” and “knaves