Trafalgar

A gripping read, full of fascinating insights into the skills and mechanisms involved as well as deeply moving vignettes of the heroism and tragedy played out on that fateful October day. Brilliant

Adam Zamoyski

If you think you know it all about the battle of Trafalgar, think again. Paul O’Keeffe’s new book is full of fascinating information that few readers will have come across before … His book is a must for Trafalgar fans

Nicholas Best, author of Trafalgar

Gives the reader a front-row seat at both the battle and its aftermath ... Brilliantly original ... O'Keeffe excels at peripheral detail [and] the battle unfolds in glorious technicolour ... By deploying a wide variety of first-hand sources from archives, contemporary accounts and newspapers, O'Keeffe has pulled off the unlikely trick of making this familiar story seem fresh and original. Acutely sensitive to human suffering, he has produced a brilliantly vivid account of the harsh reality of naval warfare that was, as Nelson's fate attests, no respecter of rank

Telegraph

Vivid … Give[s] an intense impression of just how hellish Trafalgar … must have been, an impression rendered all the more powerful by O’Keeffe’s precise, carefully restrained prose … O’Keeffe’s aim is … to bring alive, using newspaper reports, journals and other eyewitness testimony, how the battle felt to those who were there, and thereafter celebrated, mourned and memorialised it. He achieves this with striking success

The Times

O'Keeffe's gripping history deals with the life and death of Admiral Horatio Nelson - and the mournful aftermath

Independent

What makes this account so original and compelling, and quite possibly the best all-round book on the subject yet, is its political, social and cultural context, both before and after the fighting

Spectator

A tremendous tale - one of the most dramatic in our island's history - and O'Keeffe tells it beautifully

The Times on Culloden

Fascinating, meticulously researched, often brutally detailed ... without being there, those times could not be more vividly brought to life than in this tremendous book

Daily Mail on Culloden

A vibrant and vivid tale, of victory, defeat, savage retribution and 'high' art ... In our field one is often inclined to think or say, 'Do we really need another book on Culloden?' However, if they are written as well and as excitingly as Paul O'Keeffe's...then the answer is a resounding 'Yes!'

Robert Woosnam Savage FSA on Culloden

It is all here - and all told with the same verve, eye for anecdote and command of the material. This is a very good book, and a model of how narrative history should be written... anybody remotely interested in the battle should read

The Spectator on Waterloo

I was gripped by the wealth of detail and humanity in the book... This is how the tales of battles should be told, whatever the time, place or outcome

Emily Mayhew on Waterloo