TO WAR WITH WELLINGTON Peter Snow

(John Murray, £25)

The siege of Badajoz was one of many epic battles that challenged the skill and courage of the Duke of Wellington in the Napoleonic Wars and Snow illuminates the storming of its fortress with a galloping sense of pace and superlative narrative.

It was, he says, a scene of unimaginable slaughter. “Waves of British soldiers threw themselves into the breaches only to be gunned down or skewered on the hideous obstructions studded with spikes and sword blades.” Meanwhile, Sir Harry Smith met a beautiful 14-year-old Spanish girl in the ruins of Badajoz and married her in three days. “To look at her was to love her,” mused his rival, John Kinkead. Smith beat him to it and she became his ever-faithful “guardian angel”. It is such unforgettable portraits of the extreme passion of general and rifleman that Snow conjures in this study of the man who gave peace to Europe for years to come.

While the Peninsular war is overshadowed by Waterloo, it is here that the regiments were blooded and Snow’s descriptions of battles such as Talavera, Vitoria, Salamanca and Ciudad Rodrigo are unrivalled. Snow, well-known to British viewers on election nights, collates eyewitness experiences with the eye of a master storyteller, never losing sight of the overall strategy yet giving due emphasis to the sieges and battles that mark the campaign trail. He provides a classic conclusion in his account of Waterloo, with Wellington calmly guiding the “storm that raged around him”, describing the speed and ferocity with which his cavalry and infantry finally ended the reign of Napoleon.

Peter Snow is at the Woodstock Literary Festival tomorrow.