Des lances assyriennes à la kalachnikov au fusil automatique M16, un descriptif fourni des armes qui ont forgé l'Histoire, celle des Empires et des Révolutions comme celle des conflits actuels, de l'Egypte antique aux forces spéciales contemporaines.

Armes ; de l'Antiquité à nos jours

In this compelling book, Richard Holmes tells the exhilarating story of the Duke of Wellington, Britain's greatest ever soldier.

 Seeing Wellington as a remarkable figure, Holmes follows his career from the ruins of his family seat in Ireland to the plains of India where Wellesley first gained his reputation as a brilliant commander, to the horrors of the Peninsular War and Waterloo.

 Combining his astute historical analysis with semi-biographical examination, Holmes artfully illustrates the rapid evolution in military and political thinking of the time.

Wellington - The Iron Duke (Text Only)

" Il y aura toujours des amoureux de Shelley, mais ce livre n'est pas pour eux. " Voilà donc le lecteur averti: la biographie de Richard Holmes lui fera plus souvent franchir le seuil d'un enfer dantesque qu'elle ne le ravira dans le bleu virginal de cieux éthérés. L'ange Ariel, si cher à André Maurois, retrouve ici son poids de chair et de sang, avec toutes les facettes et les tourments d'un humain qui ne fut, loin s'en faut, pas toujours pur, s'il fut certes épris de pureté. Mais là réside précisément la force singulière de cette biographie: car ce qu'elle nous donne à aimer bout du compte, ce n'est pas _ ce n'est plus _ cette image idéalisée, et quelque peu émasculée, qu'une postérité victorienne soucieuse de respectabilité a cherché à donner de lui, mais un homme que sa sensibilité à fleur de peau, sa soif de savoir en tous domaines, sa passion impétueuse et son caractère indomptable exposèrent parmi d'autres, mais plus que d'autres, aux difficultés, aux drames, aux aveuglements aussi, qui sont le lot de toute existence humaine. Si Shelley apparaît alors comme un héros, c'est comme un héros tragique; et s'il s'avère un génie, ce n'est plus le fruit d'une idolâtrie mais d'une juste reconnaissance. Du même coup, c'est l'oeuvre qui se trouve tout entière remise en perspective: Shelley n'est plus seulement le poète lyrique que l'on a voulu privilégier, il est un pamphlétaire, un polémiste, un traducteur, un penseur, un essayiste, qui s'indigne des injustices de son époque, et participe à ses combats en même temps qu'il essaie de la comprendre en profondeur par toutes les voies d'accès et dans tous les registres de l'écriture. C'est donc aussi tout un tableau de l'Angleterre à l'aube du XIXe siècle que nous offre Richard Holmes et, par là-même, des débats toujours actuels qui agitent la civilisation industrielle naissante, qu'il s'agisse de la religion, des tabous moraux, du mariage, de la pauvreté, des institutions politiques, où il devient peu à peu patent que Shelley, jusque dans ses errements, fut un extraordinaire précurseur de notre temps.

Le paradoxe n'est donc, on l'aura compris, qu'apparent: c'est en fait parce qu'elle est sans fard et sans complaisance que cette biographie révèle une figure autrement plus émouvante en définitive, et d'une vertu autrement plus cathartique, que bien des portraits certes charmants, mais rendus plats à force d'avoir trop voulu en épurer les ombres. C'est un acte d'amour vrai.
R.D.

Percy bysshe shelley

Seconde guerre mondiale - Photographies

From the redcoat who served Charles II to the modern, camouflage-clad guard at Camp Bastion, from battlefield to barrack-room, this is a magisterial social history of the British soldier.

 Since 1660 the army has evolved and adapted, but the social organisation of the men has changed less, with the major combat arms retaining many of the characteristics familiar to those who fought at Blenheim, Waterloo and the Somme. The Duke of Marlborough, who built up the British army to become a world-class fighting force in the 1660s, would recognise in the tired heroes of Helmand the descendants of the men he led to victory at Blenheim over three hundred years ago.

 'Soldiers' is exhaustively researched, and Holmes's affection for the soldier shines through on every page. Above all, this book is brimming with great stories, from the chaos of the battlefield to the fug of the barrack-room, from Ulster to Bengal, from Flanders' fields to the Afghan hills. This is a magisterial social history of the British soldier - and Richard Holmes's fitting last tribute to the British soldier to whom he was so devoted.

Soldiers - Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors

'A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation' Oldie

 In this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes travels across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers.

 Central to this pursuit is a powerful evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary, some well-known and others almost lost: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft and Zélide. He investigates the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Coleridge, and the mad-visionary bard William Blake.

 The diversity of Holmes's material is testimony to his empathy, erudition and at times his mischievous streak. This is his most personal and seductive writing yet.

This Long Pursuit - Reflections of a Romantic Biographer

Sahib is a magnificent history of the British soldier in India from Clive to the end of Empire, making full use of personal accounts from the soldiers who served in the jewel in Britain's Imperial Crown.

 This is a stunning account of Indian soldiering in peace and war, from the barrack rooms to the cavalry swirling across open plains. Bestselling military historian Richard Holmes not only illuminates the lives and feelings of the men who served, but also those of the women who followed them across a vast continent, bore their children, and suffered alongside them in the merciless conditions.

Sahib - The British Soldier in India 1750–1914

Groundbreaking and critically-acclaimed, Tommy is the first history of World War I to place the British soldier who fought in the trenches centre-stage.

 Tommy tells the story of an epic and terrible war through the letters, diaries and memories of those who fought it. Epitomised by the character of Sgt Tommy Atkins, Richard Holmes portrays the strength and fallibility of the human spirit, the individuals behind the epic conflict, and their legacy.

Tommy - The British Soldier on the Western Front

'Lives that Never Grow Old' is a wonderful series- edited by Richard Holmes - that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.

 Zélide lived in her father's moated castle in Holland, like a fairytale princess in a tower. She was the clever, sexy, mercurial young Dutch blue-stocking with whom Boswell fell disastrously in love in 1764. The rest of Zélide's story was unknown until the brilliant young Boswell scholar Geoffrey Scott pieced it together from her intimate letters and essays.

 Subsequent affairs with a cynical cavalry officer, a celebrated but vacillating writer (aptly named Benjamin Constant), and a thoroughly reliable music master, took her eventually to another fairytale mansion in Switzerland. This tender, funny, faintly salacious portrait of a 'belle-esprit' is one of the most exquisite biographical miniatures ever written.

Armes ; de l'Antiquité à nos jours

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