2025 Templer Medal and Chapple Prize Shortlist
Friday 6th February 2026
We are pleased to announce that the following titles have been selected to form the Templer Medal and Chapple Prize Shortlist for 2025.
All titles are eligible for the Templer Medal for best book but only those marked with * are eligible for the Chapple Prize for best first book.
Ben Barry, The Rise and Fall of the British Army, 1975-2025 (Osprey).
An analytically driven narrative of the army’s post-Cold War trajectory, with an emphasis on policy, strategy, and political context.
*Alexander Burns, Infantry in Battle, 1733-83 (Helion).
A thought-provoking comparative analysis of British, American and Prussian infantry that challenges academic and popular misconceptions of soldiers as unthinking automata.
Brian Farrell, Misfire: British Empire Special Forces and the Defeat in Malaya in WW2 (University Press of Kansas).
How the experience of the Malayan campaign of 1941-42 led to significant lessons for subsequent British development of special forces.
David Grummitt, The Wars of the Roses: War and Martial Culture in England, 1455-87 (Oxford University Press).
A ground-breaking study of an important moment in the development of professionalism in British armed forces in the transition between retinues and contracted soldiery.
*Joel Morley, Joining Up in the Second World War: Enlistment, Masculinity and Memory of the Great War (Manchester University Press).
An impressive study of how the cultural legacy of the Great War shaped the attitudes of wartime soldiers in the Second World War.
Derek Plews, Shamrocks Among the Poppies: Musa Qal’eh 2006 – A Bloody Siege and the Failures Behind It (Helion).
A vivid and moving account of the nature of intense combat in Afghanistan and its impact on 88 men from The Royal Irish Regiment at Musa Qal’eh in August 2006.
Dermot Rooney, Slog or Swan: British Army Effectiveness in Operation Veritable, February and March 1945 (Helion).
A wide-ranging and significant contribution to operational analysis that challenges previous ‘top down’ assessments of the North West Europe campaign.