Warriors of the Queen. Fighting Generals of the Victorian Age, William Wright, Spellmount, 2014, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780752493176

The publisher's blurb characterizes the subjects of this collective biography as ‘a disparate and fascinating assemblage, made up of men of true military genius as well as egoists, fools and despots'. Surveying the careers and personalities of these men he reveals ‘not only the lives of the great military names of the period' but also those ‘whom history has overlooked' from James ‘Buster' Browne, ‘who once fought a battle in his nightshirt' to Jack Bisset, who had fought in three South African wars by his twenty-third birthday. The author, a specialist in Victorian Colonial Wars, provides new insights the blurb concludes ‘into the men who built (and sometimes endangered) the British Empire on the battlefield'.

The collection certainly contains some familiar names such as Baden Powell, Gordon of Khartoum and Garnet Wolseley, whose involvement in South Africa is the subject of specialized research by the author. However there are also some startling omissions, not least General James Yorke Scarlett, whose Charge of the Heavy Brigade at Balaclava was widely regarded by contemporaries as one of the most successful actions of the Crimean campaign A central cluster of some sixty-four military portraits accompanies the text. These images reveal subjects who sport an array of distinguished campaign medals and insignia, not to mention an effusion of mutton-chopped whiskers (with Cornelius Francis Clery,  Patrick Grant and Henry Hope Crealock vying for the most luxuriant) and stylish moustaches (with John Talbot Coke, Frederick Dobson Middleton and Abraham Roberts clear leaders in this field). Several of the subjects of the portraits are identified by nicknames, some of which are rather more self-explanatory than others, with Henry ‘Hawk's Eye' Somerset manifestly falling in the former category and William ‘Hellfire Jack' Olipherts and Arthur Fitzroy ‘No-Bobs' Hart Synnot, falling into the latter category. In one instance that of Edward ‘Curly' Hutton, actually appearing both in this section and on the book's back cover appears somewhat less than curly in the latter image which is set alongside the somewhat ambivalent quotation ‘I believe his troops do not like him, but they trust him as a Commander'.

The author has utilised unpublished original sources and a wide variety of printed sources and provides lively headlines for each of his entries which sum up their subjects' salient qualities or deficiencies. Many are described admiringly as ‘Victoria Cross Heroes' or in the case of General Sir T. Kelly-Kenny as a ‘wise old warrior', but Major-General G. Barton is dismissed as a ‘fussy little man of action'; General Sir G. Brown as an ‘irritable martinet' and Sir W. Lockhart as an ‘interesting enigma'.