War Classics – Thermopylae: The Battle for the West

For the historiographical pedant, this is most certainly a book to eschew, for they will find not a single footnote, end note, or exhaustive bibliography. However, for the avid historian, Thermopylae: the battle for the West is an absolute must-read. The research is indeed impeccable, the insights piquant, and the pace breathtaking. The author, Ernle Bradford, was not the prototypical historian with the usual panoply of degrees amassed; rather he was largely self-educated, driven one might well suspect by an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding. An enlisted seaman during the Second World War, he rose to the rank of First Lieutenant serving on a Hunt-class destroyer in the M