A vivid retelling of the Battle of Waterloo, based on unpublished soldiers’ written accounts.There were fifty thousand casualties on the single bloody day of the Battle of Waterloo: killing on the scale of the First World War. In this electrifying account, Malcolm Balen combines extraordinary first-hand accounts of the battle with the story of William Siborne, an officer who wanted to capture the moment of victory by making the perfect model.Siborne gathered together eyewitness accounts that...
The ebook of the critically acclaimed popular history book: the story of the South Sea Bubble which in Balen’s hands becomes a morality tale for our times. A classic collision of political ambition, mercenary greed and financial revolution.The early years of the 18th-century produced two great monuments: one, Christopher Wren’s new cathedral of St Paul’s, an enduring testament to principled craft and masterful construction; the other, an empty fraud of such magnitude that its collapse threatened...
