Cecil Woodham Smith

Flynn stars in this classic tale of a band of British Lancers who challenge an army of 25,000 Russians.

"Victoria found a way of ruling when people were deeply uncomfortable with having a woman on the throne. Her image as a conventional daughter, wife and widow concealed the reality of a talented, instinctive politician. Her actions, if not her words, reveal that she was tearing up the rules on how to be female. But the price of this was deep personal pain. By looking in detail at twenty-four days of her life, through diaries, letters and more, we meet Queen Victoria up-close and personal. Living with her from hour to hour, we can see and celebrte the contradictions that make up British history's most recognisable woman"--Back cover.

A first authoritative biography of Florence Nightingale which is based on a tremendous amount of new material (from family papers to her own exhaustive "private notes") and which creates a powerful, impassioned portrait. For here is no gentle lady of the lamp, but a woman who disregarded her beauty and her wellborn background, who had an amazing aptitude for organization, who avoided all public recognition, whose courage was equalled by a harsh impatience and whose mystic sense of mission was countered by an exaggerated despair. Here, from the time when she was seventeen and she first knew that she was to give her life to the service of others (for her, as well as Joan of Arc, there were the "voices"), there followed a "secret life of agony and aspiration" until she reached the certainty that she was to nurse the sick, and only sixteen years later achieved that end after a bitter break with her family. The apprenticeship which began in the wretchedly squalid hospitals of these times found its apotheosis in the Crimea where she met not only the resentment of the officers and the open freeze of the doctors, but faced the filth of fever ridden barrack hospitals, sickness and starvation, and the overloading of injured men in a calamitous campaign. Broken in health, and in spirit, she returned to England, haunted by the facts of preventable disease, determined to reform health standards. And the last decades represent a lifetime of long and often losing battles among official, political circles, solitude and invalidism, embattled crusade which was not without its cruelty, until the last years brought with them a softening serenity... An impressive, absorbing biography heralded as brilliant by the British press, which will receive strong support here. - Kirkus Review.

The events of Victoria's life are portrayed against the political and social history of Britain and the Empire.

Fair stood the wind for France / H.E. Bates -- How Brigadier Gerard won his medal / Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- The Invaders (from The Last enemy) / Richard Hillary - The War of the worlds / H.G. Wells -- All quiet on the western front / Erich Maria Remarque -- The Battle of Borodino (from War and peace) / Leo Tolstoy -- Catch 22 / Joseph Heller -- Buller's guns / Richard Hough -- Arctic convoy (from H.M.S. Ulysses) / Alistair MacLean -- The Red badge of courage / Stephen Crane -- Escape from Colditz (from They have their exits) / Airey Neave -- Goodbye to all that / Robert Graves -- The Moon's a balloon / David Niven -- The Warrior's soul / Joseph Conrad Fly for your life / Larry Forrester -- The Naked and the dead / Norman Mailer -- The Reason why / Cecil Woodham Smith -- The Affair at Coulter's Notch / Ambrose Bierce -- The Fort at Zinderneuf (from Beau Geste) / P.C. Wren -- The Cruel sea / Nicholas Monsarrat -- Waterloo (from Vanity fair / W.M. Thackeray -- Enemy coast ahead / Guy Gibson V.C. -- Into battle (from Her privates we) / Frederic Manning -