The Complete Brigadier Gerard Stories; Canongate, 2010

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Brigadier Gerard stories surely constitute the finest series of historical short stories in literature, mingling the comedy and the tragedy, the pathos and the irony, or, in Napoleon’s phrase, the sublime and the ridiculous. It is Napoleon and his Europe, his dedicated followers and the awakened nationalisms of the peoples they enraged, possessing our minds in savage realism and enrapturing romance. And in Brigadier Etienne Gerard, Arthur Conan Doyle created a hero worthy to take his place in the great line stretching from Homer’s Odysseus to George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, nearest of all perhaps to Stevenson’s Allan Breck and Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster.