img

The Spanish Ulcer

David Gates

The Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal was the most bitterly fought contest of nineteenth-century Europe. From 1808 to 1814, Spanish regulars and guerrillas, along with British forces led by Sir John Moore and the duke of Wellington, battled Napoleon's troops across the length and breadth of the Iberian Peninsula. Napoleon considered the war so insignificant that he rarely bothered to bring to it his military genius, relying instead on his marshals and simultaneously launching his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. Yet the Peninsular War was to end with total defeat for the French, and in 1813 Wellington's army crossed the Pyrenees into mainland France. What Napoleon had called "the Spanish ulcer" ultimately helped bring down the French empire. Michael Howard of Oxford University hailed this book as "a major achievement . . . the first brief and balanced account of the war to have appeared within our generation." Illustrated with over a hundred maps and fifty contemporary drawings and paintings, this is a richly detailed history of a crucial period in history that resonates powerfully to this day -- and figures prominently in Bernard Cornwell's internationally acclaimed novels of the Napoleonic era.>

  • Classification : General Non-Fiction
  • Pub Date : OCT 30, 2001
  • Imprint : Perseus Books
  • Page Extent : 576
  • Binding : PB
  • ISBN : 9780306810831
  • Price : INR 1,710
image

David Gates

David Gates lives in Missoula Montana and Granville New York. He teaches at the University of Montana and in the Bennington Writing Seminars and was an editor at Newsweek where he specialised in music and books. He is the author of two novels Jernigan and Preston Falls and the story collection The Wonders of the Invisible World. Jernigan was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates's short stories have appeared in the New Yorker Rolling Stone Esquire Paris Review and Granta.

Discover more books

Jernigan

David Gates

To search by Publisher, Imprint, Category and Subject, please use Advanced Search