The defeat of Napoleon in the Iberian Peninsula and at Waterloo underlined the strategic brilliance of the Duke of Wellington, who won his military spurs in India.

Peter Snow’s superb narrative of these highly attritional battles, To War With Wellington (John Murray, £25) ranks with the best in the long parade of literature devoted to the campaigns and sieges that marked a turning point in British history.

Snow’s descriptive writing brings pace and colour to the duel between Europe’s two early 19th-century supremos.

The legendary battle of the Little Bighorn is the centrepiece of The Last Stand (Bodley Head, £20) by Nathaniel Philbrick, but it is his observations on the clash between two societies as the Old West began to fade that make this a great book. The colonial ambition of the pioneers, hungry for land, is set against the traditional values of Cheyenne and Sioux Indians in this creative study of General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry and their crushing defeat by Sitting Bull in a classic ambush.

For sheer escapism, I round off with two historical novels: The Pirate Devlin (Hodder and Stoughton, £12.99, published in paperback as Fight for Freedom (£6.99) by Mark Keating, a richly rewarding tale of piracy on the high seas and the pursuit of French treasure, and To Kill A Tsar (John Murray, £18.99) by Andrew Williams, a bold portrait of revolutionaries seeking to assassinate Tsar Alexander II in St Petersburg. Both novels have a gripping authenticity.