About the Author

N.A.M. Rodger is Professor of Naval History at Exeter University and Anderson Senior Research Fellow, National Maritime Museum. He is the author of The Wooden World and The Admiralty as well as the highly acclaimed first volume of his naval history of Britain, The Safeguard of the Sea (available in Penguin).

Reviews

I have never reviewed a book that has given me more pleasure … a masterpiece
*Mail on Sunday*

A great work of history … A truly satisfying book that one puts down with regret … Nothing written during the past century, perhaps ever, approaches N. A. M. Rodger’s ambitious and masterly three-volume Naval History of Britain … it is likely to be regarded as one of the greatest works of historical scholarship of our age
*The Sunday Times*

Magisterial … triumphantly succeeds in moving the Royal Navy back to centre-stage in our islands’ story
*Sunday Telegraph*

Quite outstanding
*The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year*

Stunning … By the time the book closes there is no doubt who holds command
*Literary Review*

Monumental … Rodger is our finest naval historian
*Daily Telegraph*

Exciting and original … Here is that rarest of all historians, the expert with the generalist’s approach
*Guardian*

Truly in a class of its own … at turns witty, provocative and incisive … you finish it wishing for more
*History Today*

Scholarly and erudite, but also a thrilling story, told with wit and verve
*Economist, Books of the Year*

Splendid … There is plenty of old-fashioned narrative in this encyclopaedic blockbuster … the writing advances across the pages like a squadron of dreadnoughts
*Spectator*

An enterprise of truly stupendous scope and erudition … Even the annotated bibliography, with its deadpan, often savage comments, is a pleasure to read
*Evening Standard*

N. A. M. Rodger is the doyen of naval scholars … This is an excellent book
*New Statesman*

The adjective "magisterial" is justified for this colossal second volume of a complete history of British sea power, which began with The Safeguard of the Sea (1998); the author of the classic 18th-century British naval history, The Wooden World, has surpassed himself here. The book opens with the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649; for its duration there were two British navies, the Commonwealth Navy (which laid the foundations for a professional officer corps and fought the First Dutch War of 1652-1654) and a semipiratical Royalist Navy-in-Exile. After the Restoration, we quickly find the diarist Samuel Pepys exercising less literary but more permanent influence as secretary (or chief administrative officer) of the admiralty. The book offers colossal amounts of information (organized sometimes thematically, sometimes chronologically) right through to its endpoint of 1815, accompanied by a formidable set of notes and bibliography, as well as 24 pages of illustrations. The author not only avoids a hagiography of famous admirals but displays psychological insight in his portraits of, for example, the trio of Lord St. Vincent, his protege Nelson and Nelson's indispensable second, Collingwood. Rodger also demonstrates a firm grasp of the relationship of technical subjects (the amount of tar caulking a ship needed) to British strategy (keeping the Baltic sources of tar accessible). Readers without an intense interest in the subject may be daunted; readers without some background knowledge in British social history may be somewhat at sea in the author's discussion of the officer corps and the recruitment of sailors (usually through the press-gang). Serious students of naval history, however, will find this absolutely indispensable; this is the place to find out whence the navy of Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower came. Agent, Peter Robinson at Curtin Brown (London). (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

As Mr. Rodger demonstrates on almost every page, if you do not understand the importance of British maritime history, you can never fully understand Britain.
Rodger illuminates the world of Nelson and Hardy and its portrayal by C. F. Forrester in the Hornblower novels and Patrick O Brian in the Aubrey and Maturin cycle . . . to understand the Royal Navy at its peak, Rodger s account is indispensable