Word: bryants
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...Elegance, by Arthur Bryant. Third volume of a brilliant historical trilogy on England during the Napoleonic era (TIME, June...
...ELEGANCE (450 pp.)-Arthur Bryant-Harper...
Czarist Parallel. Few historians are better equipped to tell this story than Briton Arthur Bryant. In two previous books (The Years of Endurance, Years of Victory), he covered the decades 1793-1812 with the grasp of a Gibbon, the imagination of an epic novelist. The Age of Elegance is the last of a trilogy and, if anything, more readable than the others...
...Bryant tries neither to teach nor to hector, but his book is full of parallels with the history being made today. The Czar's soldiers had smashed Napoleon's Grande Armee, but had become the terror of the people they liberated. "Better the French as enemies," German peasants were beginning to say, "than the Russians as friends." The fears of Europe were much the same as the world's today: "What if. having occupied Finland, Bessarabia and Poland, the northern colossus should now strike southwards across the central Asian deserts to the Indian Ocean?" And when British...
...Some of Bryant's best pages describe the fighting of Wellington's army in Spain. His account of the battle of Waterloo is a model of brevity, exact and graphic. But it is old England itself which most excites Bryant, its landed wealth, its civilization, its regard for personal liberty, its native good sense. No mere passionless chronicler, Historian Bryant knows what he likes and doesn't like. "True aristocracy, after true religion," he writes, "is the greatest blessing a nation can enjoy." And the older England had enjoyed that blessing, along with several lesser ones-including...