Annual Booklist 2021 : Contributors
With long winter nights setting in, there’s plenty of time for reading in the months ahead so, as is now traditional, we offer the SAHR annual booklist with a selection of recommendations from a selection of scholars, enthusiasts, and soldiers including the winners of some of our recent prizes and some of the speakers from our series of Centenary talks and conferences. If you are looking to treat yourself, drop hints ahead of the gift-buying season, or find a present for the military historian in your life, there should hopefully be something here for you.
Nicholas P. Perry
Nick Perry read History at Trinity College Dublin and spent 37 years as a civil servant, mainly in the Ministry of Defence and Northern Ireland Office, retiring in 2018. He was also a reserve officer in the Royal Irish Rangers. He is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Kent on the Irish landed class and the British Army and is the author of Major General Oliver Nugent: The Irishman who led the Ulster Division in the Great War (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation 1920), winner of the SAHR Templer Best First Book Prize for 2020.
Patrick Watt
Dr Patrick Watt is a historian and curator based in Istanbul. He is a former curator of the National War Museum of Scotland at Edinburgh Castle and is currently working on a project which examines the development of military museology in Britain, part-funded by an SAHR Centenary Grant. Patrick is interested in the social and cultural history of conflict in the period between 1745 and 1918 with a particular focus on material culture, Scotland and empire. His work has been published in Historical Research, the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, and the International Review of Scottish Studies.
Sarah Ashbridge
Dr Sarah Ashbridge is a Research Fellow in Military Science at the Royal United Service Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). She has recently completed her PhD thesis which examined the development and implementation of identity discs, the identification of human remains during the First World War and the ways in which public memory has been shaped by the Commonwealth War Graves Cemeteries which were established during the conflict. She has helped to recover the remains of British and German soldiers during archaeological fieldwork.
Malcolm Archibald
Malcolm Archibald is a novelist and historian who has written crime and military fiction as well as non-fiction work on the whaling industry. His novel Blood Oath was the 2020-2021 winner of the SAHR Prize for Military Fiction. For more on his work, see: http://www.malcolmarchibald.com/
Zack White
Zack White is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Southampton, specialising in crime and punishment in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. He is presenter of the podcast The Napoleonicist (https://anchor.fm/the-napoleonicist), co-host of History Hack (https://historyhack.podbean.com/), sits on the committees of the Waterloo Association and War & Society Collaborative, and is Chair of the Napoleonic & Revolutionary War Graves Charity.
Ben Barry
Brigadier Ben Barry is the Senior Fellow for Land Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Ben joined the IISS in 2010, before which he served in the British Army rising to command an armoured infantry battalion and a multinational brigade on UN and NATO operations in Bosnia. He was director of the British Army Staff in the UK Ministry of Defence and author of the Army’s lessons learned analysis of post-conflict stabilisation of Iraq. His book Blood, Metal and Dust: How Victory turned into Defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq was runner-up for the 2020 SAHR Templer Medal.
Craig Lawrence
Major General Craig Lawrence CBE is a retired British Army officer whose last appointment was as the Director of Joint Warfare at the Directorate of Joint Warfare. He is now an author of fiction and non-fiction and a lecturer at the Royal College of Defence Studies. https://www.craiglawrence.co/home.html
Daniel Whittingham
Dr Daniel Whittingham is Lecturer in the History of Warfare and Conflict at the University of Birmingham, specialising in British colonial warfare, counterinsurgency, and the two world wars. His book Charles E Callwell and the British Way in Warfare was runner-up for the 2020 SAHR Best First Book Prize.
Carol Dixon-Smith
Carol Dixon-Smith has worked as an educator and a bookseller, and in her retirement has recently joined the Council of SAHR in the role of Events Coordinator.