Annual Booklist 2025 : Dr Paul Knight
Paul Knight is an Army Reserve officer, currently employed as the SO2 Historical Analysis at the Land Warfare Centre. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Liverpool and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Research interests include the Territorial Force/Army, the First World War in Middle East especially Mesopotamia, and the American War of Independence, plus whatever topic the army gives him to research. His books include Lessons from the Mud: 55th (West Lancashire) Division at the Third Battle of Ypres and A Very Fine Regiment: The 47th Foot during the American War of Independence, 1773-1783. He is currently working on a book on the Second Battle of Ramadi, 1917.
Matthew Spring, With Zeal and With Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783 (University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2008)
This book revolutionised how I looked at the aims and objectives of the British Army, how they intended to fight, and how they fought the conflict. It shattered the myth of the unthinking redcoat, although this persists in many sectors. This is still my first point of reference and has inspired my own research.
William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (Bloomsbury, London, 2019)
The British in India is tainted by anti-imperial and anti-colonial sentiments, but this book paints a vivid picture of a different Britain in India, as one of multiple European and Asian organisations struggling to survive in an imploding Indian polity. All of Dalrymple’s books show a balanced understanding of both sides of the history.
Andrew Roberts, George III (Allen Lane, London, 2021)
Subtitled the life and reign of Britian’s most misunderstood monarch, the duality of a George’s reputation in the UK (‘Farmer George’, and the sympathy of his later ‘madness’) and that in the US (tyranny), makes for a brilliant subject. Roberts negotiates the topic with sympathy, exploring the flawed man, like all of us, and also the systems in which the policy operated. Well worth reading on both sides of the Atlantic.
Jonathan Fennell, The People’s War (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020)
To be able to cover the whole of the Second World War for several British Armies (Indian, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand as well as the UK), over multiple theatres, including the impact of inter-allied cooperation and the enemy, from an original perspective (morale) is a great achievement. He paints the performance of the various armies at different periods of the war in a new light where morale impacted on operational effectiveness, and operational effectiveness impacted morale. At 700 pages, it is daunting to pick up but was easy to read.
Max Hasting, The Korean War (Pan, London, 2020)
My current research project for the army is examining certain aspects of the Korean War. I had only a superficial knowledge of this war when I started. Although Hasting’s book is not the most recent (I have Dannatt and Lyman’s Korea: War Without End to read next), it was refreshing to read an entirely new period where every page revealed something new. Hastings is also a master storyteller.
For me, the book that doesn’t exist is more a style of military history, which is how were battles fought at the tactical level? We have the doctrine, and we have the accounts of how battles were fought, but often these are separated. I think Matthew Spring achieves this for the American War of Independence and more recently Alexander Burns in Infantry in Battle 1733-1783. I attempted it in Lessons from the Mud for 1917. Dermot Rooney’s Slog or Swan for 1944/5 gets into the lower-level formation action. Jonathan Fennell in The People’s War refers to WW2 German tactical successes, often driven by fanaticism, but which was lacking in the British Armies in Malaya, for example.