Featuring previously unpublished sources, this 'enjoyable as well as massively impressive' bestseller is a definitive account of the Boer War (Financial Times)

The war declared by the Boers on 11 October 1899 gave the British, as Kipling said, 'no end of a lesson'. It proved to be the longest, the costliest, the bloodiest and the most humiliating campaign that Britain fought between 1815 and 1914.

Thomas Pakenham's narrative is based on first-hand and largely unpublished sources ranging from the private papers of the leading protagonists to the recollections of survivors from both sides. Mammoth in scope and scholarship, as vivid, fast-moving and breathtakingly compelling as the finest fiction. The Boer War is the definitive account of this extraordinary conflict - a war precipitated by greed and marked by almost inconceivable blundering and brutalities...and whose shattering repercussions can be felt to this very day.

'Not only a magnum opus, it is a conclusive work ... Enjoyable as well as massively impressive' -
Financial Times

'This is a wonderful book: brilliantly written ... the reader turns each page with increasing fascination and admiration' -A.J.P. Taylor