Annual Booklist 2025 : Zeb Micic
Zeb Micic has been a member of the Society’s Council since 2023. He teaches History and Politics at Sherborne School, and is working on a history of militarism in Victorian public schools.
Although I still admire Fortescue’s History of the British Army (perhaps more than I should!), I have choses Hew Strachan’s Politics of the British Army (1997) to represent the institutional history of the Army. It is such an important book (and I expect the one most historians wished they had written) revealing that the supposed neutrality of the Army from the seventeenth century onwards is often little more than a façade.
Scott Hughes Myerly’s British Military Spectacle from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Crimea (1996) considers the ways in which the Army projected power at home and abroad at its Victorian height. Myerly gives some attention to decorations and medals – an interest of mine – but there is still more work to be done! With Luke Reynolds’ Waterloo, I am glad that the cultural and material history of the Army is receiving some attention.
John Hussey’s magisterial two-volume Waterloo is a very special book indeed, and a work of great scholarship. It is impossible not to admire the huge array of sources from both sides of the conflict, as well as the author’s admirable turn of phrase; both make the two volumes so enjoyable to read. A recording of his lecture at the Society’s 2018 Templer lecture is on YouTube and would make splendid Festive watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyrUrJd6-UQ&t=2s
By profession I am a schoolmaster (and Victorian militarism in public schools in my current area of research) and find it impossible not to be moved by the stories of schoolboy experiences during the wars. There have been many splendid volumes published (on Oundle and Uppingham for example), but these are hardly Christmas reads. Anthony Clayton’s The British Officer: Leading from the Front (2006) picks up many of these ideas.
There are many excellent memoirs of Second World War service, and some of my favourites were published by the much-lamented Michael Russell. I have chosen John McManners’ Fusilier: Recollections and Reflections 1939-1945 (2002) which is as much a study of humanity and faith, as it is war. McManners was ordained after the war and had a dazzling academic life, writing this book when he was Chaplain of All Souls, Oxford.
There are so many books yet to be written which makes our subject such an absorbing one. My suggestion is a ‘legal’ history of the Army, covering the work of the Judge Advocate General and his office, and the Army Legal Services. There is some interesting material – I read Brigadier R. C. Halse’s interesting (but unpublished) memoirs as part of my research for a chapter on First World War courts-martial – which someone ought to pull together.