Eh? Re-visiting Napoleon's defeat in Russia

From Salon in a piece "Napoleon's Russian defeat, reexamined" - on the basis of how a well-prepared army -- and not the legendary winter -- turned the tide on the French emperor.

"Much has been written about how and why Napoleon came to lose more than a half-million men in the Russian invasion. Hitler and his generals even studied the ill-fated campaign hoping to avoid making similar mistakes. But missing from Western scholarship on the Napoleonic Wars is a full-fledged account of how Russia came to smash Napoleon. With "Russia Against Napoleon: The True Story of the Campaigns of War and Peace," Dominic Lieven, one of the preeminent scholars of 19th-century Russia, aims to fill the void, tackling not only the French invasion of 1812, but also the battles of 1813-1814. What sets Lieven's book apart from the handful of other accounts is his prolific use of Russian sources, particularly regimental histories available to Western researchers only since 1991."

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Reading the Chilcot Inquiry Report more closely

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An unpalatable truth!

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Mahler's Prodigal Son

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