A roll call of honour

‘This,’ announces Max Hast- ings at the outset, ‘is an old-fashioned book.’ So it is, and it is none the worse for it. As a schoolboy, Hastings thrilled to a 1920s’ anthology called Stirring Deeds of the Great War. His own book, a Brief Lives-style collection of essays on 14 of the most colourful or daring figures in (roughly) modern warfare, offers many of the pleasures those deeds must once have stirred, now overlaid with a more considered, war historian’s interest in what drives the very few people who turn out to be exceptionally brave in harm’s way.

It is an old-fashioned book in other respects too. It expresses a nostalgia for the days, before the development of deadly modern technologies, when the business of war entailed huge risks and could proportionately reward individual bravery. Its heroes — 13 men and one woman, from the Napoleonic wars to Israel’s 1973 tank war on the Golan Heights — were from an age when war was more personal.