Death or Victory

"This is an account of the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and the key role in the victory there of Britain’s General Wolfe who managed to secure Canada for the British Empire. France and Britain were in global rivalry with each other and the British didn’t want to lose North America to their enemies. Quebec was the French Canadian capital and it had to be seized by the British. Dan describes the daring attack by Wolfe’s army in brilliant detail. I learnt a lot from reading Dan’s book. It helped inspire me in the writing of my own book on Wellington because he secures the reader’s attention with a skilful use of narrative. He drives the story on throughout the book, using an amazing amount of scholarly research. I had great ease getting my eye-witness accounts for my book on Wellington. I know how much trouble he had finding eye-witness material in a period 50 years before the great surge of writing in the Napoleonic War. But he managed to find remarkable accounts of the extraordinary story of the fight for Quebec. We learn how General Wolfe found the way up the Heights of Abraham and forced the French to do battle. It is a masterly piece of storytelling. With each of the books, Battlefield Britain and Twentieth Century Battlefields, we wrote half each. We chose eight battles in each book, so each of us had four chapters to write. We then exchanged what we’d written for the other to correct, and, of course, all the time we were chatting away, comparing notes. Dan was living at home with me part of the time. So we swapped our chapters two or three times and each one of us corrected the other. And it worked very well. We do think very much alike. He is the historian with an encyclopaedic knowledge of what went on and I am the journalist. We complement each other pretty well. Both of us did history at university. Dan got a first in history at Oxford about ten years ago and I studied ancient history , so we had that common interest. My interest in military history was enhanced by 30 or 40 years covering wars and battles as a journalist. But that was day-to-day coverage. The joy of writing these books with Dan was that they were not about instant coverage but about reflective study. We could look back with hindsight and make much more sense of these great moments in history. I went to Vietnam, for example, and covered it instantly on ITN and News at Ten – but to be able to take the time to look back at the Tet offensive in Vietnam and write about it with Dan was very rewarding."