Annual Booklist 2025 : Andrew Young
Andrew Young is a former Royal Navy officer specialising in professional military education. He has worked at the Royal United Services Institute on Whitehall, and taught on courses at Britannia Royal Naval College, Commando Training Centre Royal Marines, Joint Services Command and Staff College, and RAF College Cranwell. Currently the Fellowships Officer for the Navy’s internal think tank, the RN Strategic Studies Centre (RNSSC), he is also a part-time PhD candidate at King’s College London working on amphibious warfare during the eighteenth century. His lecture on the 1757 Rochefort Expedition formed part of SAHR’s 2025 online talks programme.
Corelli Barnet, Britain and Her Army (Allen Lane, 1970)
A classic of its age, this book gives a wave-top review of the British Army's development, transforming from a king's army to a national institution. I found a second-hand hardback copy of this when I was an undergrad at King's in the mid-2000s, and it has been a constant companion ever since, mainly because of the broad consistency between Barnet's perspectives and the ongoing transformation of the British Army during the age of insurgency. Whilst his analysis is very much of its time, and the historiography does need updating and enlarging upon through the reader's own self-direction, military practitioners and students will still find his observations pertinent, insightful, and veering between depressing and enlightening! Above all, Barnet was writing for a policy aware audience; the book is an overt example of the power of academic lobbying on current political thinkers and doers. Today, few people seem to have the time (or predilection?) for reading. Barnet's writing is an example of how to engage the reader through erudition and rhetoric; a dying, if not entirely lost, art.
Patrick Hennessey, The Junior Officer's Reading Club (Allen Lane, 2009)
This 2009 book defined many young officer's view of what it was to lead and exist in the Army that found itself embroiled in Afghanistan in the late 2000s, and was a constant companion in my own career (albeit Dark Blue rather than Khaki). In some respects, it is a throw-back to the coming-of-age biographies of a century earlier; there are shades of George MacDonald Fraser's The General Danced at Dawn, or Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer in its pages as the author wends his way through the oft-times surreal experience of modern soldiering. The juxtaposition of peacetime Public Order duties with the frenetic pace of operations captures an officer, and an army, in search of itself whilst caught between realities. A modern memoir that records a highly contextual snapshot in time whilst expressing perpetual continuity - something which any military professional needs to keep in their eye to guide their own experiences as they navigate the turbulent 2020s and '30s. Plus ca change! This should be on every Sandhurst-aspirant's bookshelf (but not to be displayed in your grot until at least week 5!), so a welcome stocking filler.
J.A Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army 1715-1795 (Oxford University Press, 1981)
No SAHR bookshelf would be complete without Houlding; he is to the Georgian British Army what N.A.M. Rodger is to the Georgian Navy. His work is almost unique in both its breadth and depth of study; he touches on every element of what modern military doctrine terms the three components of fighting power - Physical; Moral; and Conceptual. Not only that, but his is a properly scholarly tome that can be cross-referenced and used as a jumping-off point for further enquiries – a must for PhD research! Houlding's assessment of the British Army as being one that learnt 'on the job' is one of those perennial observations that strikes hard. Certainly, in conversations I've had with currently serving personnel, it pulls them up short to learn that the same training deficits, plethora of taskings to support the civil authorities, and divergent operational requirements – all whilst combating recruitment and retention shortfalls – are nothing new. Houlding, then, not only provides a valuable historical analysis, but modern insight.
Christopher Hibbert, Corunna (Pan, 1967)
I doubt there are many students of the British army who have never heard of Hibbert. In some respects, he was the forerunner of more modern popular historians like Mark Urban or Saul David. I came relatively late to Corunna, requiring it for my own chapter on the subject for US Army University Press, but it was no less welcome for it: this slender tome still manages to capture the excruciating pain of an army forced to retreat through circumstance – rather than direct military action against it – and faced with annihilation in what is essentially a hostile land. Through his use of personal testimonies, Hibbert crafted a Xenophon-ic narrative, transforming Moore's army into a British Ten Thousand desperately trying to reach the safety of the sea. One could be forgiven for thinking the campaign and (almost anti-) climactic battle as some form of victory, if it were not for the appalling losses suffered through attrition, negligence, and the small-minded penny-pinching of officials in England that shut the military hospitals. Unfortunately, this litany is so very apt for our own times; again, a volume that should be read with an eye to the present state of Defence.
Robin Wright, The Life of Major General James Wolfe, Founded on Original Documents (Chapman and Hall, 1864 (Forgotten Books reprints))
This is my 'niche'(r) read! Available as a reprint via several online retailers, I have found this invaluable in my own research, and thus is included here really as a pointer to what is available out there. Whilst biographies of Wolfe abound – Reilly, Garrett, Brumwell all provide excellent mutually supporting perspectives – they all lack the authenticity to be found within this solid tome (it comes in at a hefty 626 pages!). Wright included pages of letters in unexpurgated form in his biography, which offers the reader rare insights without having to retrieve said items from the archives. In doing so, we get a clearer sense of the man that Wolfe was without the author's perspective or chosen quotations, and can see how the mundane and the profane mixed with his furtherance of operational art. But more than anything, this inclusion is an example of the huge array of sources available to us today through print-on-demand and the digitalisation of long out-of-print texts. So whilst Wolfe may not be your bag, there will be a book out there from the 1850s, or even the 1750s, which is.
My personal interest lies in amphibious warfare – in no small part owed to filial loyalty to my late father's capbadge, and summers spent haunting the armoury and sailing centre in RM Barracks Stonehouse! The book I would love to see written is a cross between Huw J. Davies' Wandering Army and Jeremy Black's How the British Army Made Britain a Global Power through the prism of expeditionary warfare. There are so many discrete books covering elements of each, but no single tome bringing the whole together in a cohesive format. Harding's Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century and Boscawen's Louisbourg 1758 are excellent examples of the many campaign narratives that abound, but there is yet to be a compelling, long-view perspective of how amphibious warfare became an almost exclusively British success story, one that reached its apogee in the many littoral campaigns of the late 18th and (short) 19th century, but found a nadir at Gallipoli. My own research into Thomas More Molyneux and Conjunct Expeditions identifies the inflection point, but the topic needs more, and it is almost perverse that the very thing that differentiated the British Army from its peer contemporaries in Europe – its maritime expeditionary nature – is often little more than a footnote, if not a passing comment.