Coolness under fire

The early 19th century was the age of the dandy, and the essence of dandyism was cool self-control. The dandy shunned displays of feeling. There is feeling a-plenty in both these books; yet they may fairly be described as novels which bear the characteristics of dandyism. Though not short of action — something the dandies deprecated — they are cool, elegant and laconic.

Stella Tillyard is known as a historian of 18th- and early 19th-century aristocratic and royal life. Tides of War is her first novel, and a very accomplished one. It moves easily between domestic and political scenes in London and Norfolk, and the Peninsula, where Wellington’s army, with the help of Spanish guerrillas, whom Wellington valued little, is gradually winning the war against the French. For Britain the Peninsula was the main theatre of the war; for Napoleon it was a sideshow, and it was his disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia which enabled Wellington eventually to drive the French back over the Pyrenees and to invade southern France.