Wellington: The Iron Duke

I have studied Napoleon for a good while yet this is the first biography I have ever read about the Duke of Wellington. Mr. Holmes does a good job of going through all of Wellington's life without getting into nitty gritty details. The book is roughly 200-250 pages and covers all of Wellington's life from his birth, the campaigns in Flanders, India, Spain, Waterloo, and his prime ministry. The military campaigns are covered in adequate detail, enough to know what happened, but not enough to confuse the reader or draw a military thesis statement from. The same goes with regards to his session as prime minister. So bottom line is if you are looking for a good book on the Duke that is an easy read and covers his whole life in a concise single volume, I strongly suggest this one.

Richard Holmes's "Wellington - The Iron Duke" is a well-written survey of the active life of the First Duke of Wellington. In just 300 pages, Holmes presents a balanced, even nuanced view of a man who was both the quintessential military professional and a complex human being. Through Holmes' efficient prose, we see Wellington as an extradinarily dedicated soldier who mastered his profession in ways few of his contemporaries did, yet who sometimes paid a price on campaign for his insistence on micromanaging his armies. Wellington comes across as a remarkably honest and duty-bound public servant; as a young man, he was also relentlessly ambitious, and as an older man, sensitive about his military reputation. Holmes provides some useful insights. He suggests that exhaustion and strain were responsible for Wellington's uncharacteristically poor performance at the Siege of Burgos in 1812. Holmes examines the academic dispute over Wellington's relationship with the Prussians during the Waterloo Campaign; he tellingly notes Wellington's responsibilities to his alliance partners and to the British Government and finds that he served both. Holmes acknowledges Wellington's extramaritial activities but resists the urge to obsess over them or to indulge in psycological speculation. Serious students of the Duke and of the Napoleonic Wars will find no new scholarship here; indeed, Holmes readily acknowledges his debt to earlier works such as Elizabeth Longford's exceptional biography and Jac Weller's battlefield narrative trilogy. Holmes has provided an accessible biography for the general reader, supported by well-chosen quotes from the Duke' contemporaries and by a nice selection of illustrations. This book is highly recommended to the general reader with an interest in the man and the era.

Brillient! Wellington The Iron Duke is something boys of my generation looked up to. He had a reputation of a great soldier ,long before the wars against Napoleon. And, were wars that involved greater problems than those presented by Napoleon. As a young officer, he fough in India, against bigger armies, and more dangerous foes, because there were no 'reserves' to back him up in India. The heat, themalarial carrying mosquitoes, and the type opf warfare he engaged in, and won, were far more dangerous than the war against the French. And again, this tireless commander rode with his tyroops and was directing the attacks personally, and since much of the battles were hand to hand, sword against sword, he was more in personal daanger, than ever he was in Spain or France. He did not do what Napoleon did, stand at the back and send his marshals foreward. He rode with them into battle, riding around the field where his presence was needed, while 'Nappie' as the British army called him, sat on a chair with his telescope,sending out new orders. He was constantly changing horses, and was at the front,where his men could see and hear his orders personally. A superb rider and fearless swordsman, he was the model modern soldier, and a real hero. A hundred years later there were several British writers, who wrote books againt his reputation, but gained no reputation themselves, except bad ones.

Best biography of the infamous Duke of Wellington that I’ve read. Well researched and extremely well written.

After reading a book on Waterloo, I wanted to find out more about the stern but courageous General who won in India, Spain and of course beat Napoleon at the big, bloody battle of Waterloo. I learned the basic facts of his long life and his personal life, which was so different and hard to understand from our perspective.

Well researched and thorough yet an easy read. I was sad to turn the last page. Great author writing about an exceptional man

Worth the time. The character of great men is worth study. Observe the flow of greatness from birth to death. Wellington overcame obstacles and did not allow them to overcome him.

I vastly enjoyed this book, I learned so much that I had not previously knew about this great man. I agree with the author, the world will never see another Wellington. He was truly one of a kind and whose sense of duty one to emulate.

This was a gift for my mom and she loved it... said it was a very interesting book!

There is no doubt about it, Richard Holmes was a splendid writer and has written a splendid book. Having read some works on the Napoleonic Wars I was unprepared to have the preconcieved nuances of my views on Wellington to be quite so challenged. I had carried the simplistic and certainly conventional thought that the Duke was really just an rather efficient logistician, who fought his war largely by calculating the odds and through exceptional organisation - all rather dull. At a personal level, it wasn't so much his affairs but the offhand treatment of his wife which one found a little challenging. Finally, reading about his political life, I had also found his "high" Tory views somewhat constricted. In short, I thought him a very able general, although a somewhat unlikeable individual. However, in 300 or so pages, Mr. Holmes has caused me to go back to my book shelves once again and reconsider my somewhat naive views. There are a number of thoughts I took away from this book, but perhaps the most worthy of consideration may be the following: 1) Wellington clearly was more than a great general in the context of the Penisular; He has to be considered a great general for the ages. It is said that he was a defensive, unimaginative and somewhat uninspirational leader - none of this can be true in the context of his outstanding military achievements in both India and the Penisular. Mr. Holmes does well to bring out the strengths which made him the genius he was and hopefully this goes some way to correcting two centuries of negative propaganda around his generalship. I particularly like Mr. Holmes' even-handed approach when dealing with controversies, particularly Badajoz (where it seems apparent he lost control of his troops) and Waterloo (where he was conflicted with national imperatives and the need to support his allies). 2) Touching on his personal life, I am glad Mr. Holmes did not feel the need to go into prurient details, but it was evident that Wellington had an unhappy marriage. How he coped with this seems to have at least involved discretion but what I think brought his humanity to the fore was his observations following his wife's death. Sadly, it also seems clear that his relationships with his children seemed somewhat poor - perhaps, to paraphrase Douro, because they all hard a terrifically hard act to follow. Beyond his family though, there does seem to be strong evidence that he was in fact warm hearted and generous behind the public facade. 3) As to his politics he comes across as man of the times working in a framework of principles, but at least did have the flexibility of mind to shift his position on various issues. His political career was not stellar in any real sense, but I think it hard to see his goverment service as anything but a good man trying, by his lights, to do what was right for the country and his monarch. In short, no review of mine can do justice to this excellent biography, but I just would have liked to thank Mr. Holmes for vividly showing the Duke to be a much more complex, gifited, humane, interesting and, (dare I say it since Holmes himself may not have agreed), likeable man than I had previously understood to be the case.

The authors knowledge is prodigious, and I did appreciate the author’s goal of bringing forth the “real” Wellington, who by the end, and I don’t think this a spoiler alert, still remains a hero for all time, and an amazing human being. However, and it may be the fact I purchased the e-book version (no illustrations, etc) but the tone seemed at times unduly scholarly, where the sentences and paragraphs, even the chapters, seemed to run on so that the material became almost a disconnected blur. After a while. This is in contrast to the style of the author’s introduction and conclusion — too bad he didn’t write like that throughout…. Still, a great job and I appreciated it. I recommend it.

Richard Holmes is an eminent historian and a splendid TV presenter but, though I found his study of the great Duke of Wellington an enjoyable biography that I couldn't put down until it was finished, I also found myself being irritated on too many of the 303 pages by mis-spellings and stylistic and punctuation inconsistencies. An example of the latter was the mixed and varying use of inverted commas (quote marks). My own preference is for the end of a phrase or a sentence to appear thus: '................... end,' or '..................... end.' Too often the style was thus '........................ end', or '........................... end'. Mr Holmes ought to have made up his mind which way his work was to appear or his editor ought to have been sacked! Another niggle was that the Duke's Hampshire home was named only once as 'Strathfieldsaye,' with '[sic]' to follow. Mr Holmes should have been aware that that was the original spelling and that 'Stratfield Saye' is the more modern name of the house and estate. I mustn't criticise too much, however, because I learned a lot from a very good book and I recommend it to other lovers of our British history and other admirers of one of the greatest and most courageous Britons ever to have been born.

Inhaltlich einwandfrei aber leider ein billig gemachter Nachdruck von amazon, was nicht ersichtlich war beim Bestellen. Abbildungen haben schlechte Qualität, Details sind nicht zu erkennen. Schon das zweite Mal, dass ich beim Aufschlagen eines neuen Buches merkte, dass es nicht das Original des Verlags sonderm ein Nachdruck von Amazon ist. Das nenne ich Etikettenschwindel und Betrug!