My interest in the Qin army did not begin with John Man’s book. It goes back to reading Arthur Cotterell’s earlier account of the First Emperor and the terracotta warriors, and to seeing the warriors in exhibition settings in Australia. My earlier visit to the Melbourne Museum gave me a direct sense of their physical presence, scale, and quiet authority. Late last year, I also viewed the exhibition at the Museum of Western Australia, which renewed that interest and allowed me to return to the subject with more reading and reflection behind it. As a wargamer, I have also always wanted to put together a Qin army, though like many such projects it has remained one of those ambitions I never quite got around to completing. That combination of Cotterell’s original book, museum experience, wargaming interest, and continuing curiosity about ancient armies provides the background against which I approached Man’s The Terracotta Army: China’s First Emperor and the Birth of a Nation.

John Man’s book is a readable and engaging account of one of the great archaeological discoveries of the modern age. It is not simply a book about rows of clay soldiers standing silently beneath the soil of Xi’an. Man uses the terracotta army as a doorway into a much larger story: the rise of Qin Shi Huang, the violent unification of China, the creation of imperial authority, and the extraordinary political and military system that made such a burial complex possible.

That wider approach is the book’s main strength. Man does not treat the warriors as an isolated wonder. He places them within the machinery of the Qin state, with its disciplined armies, standardised administration, harsh legalism, massive labour demands, and almost overwhelming imperial ambition. The terracotta army becomes evidence of something much larger than funerary art. It becomes a statement about power. It shows a ruler who expected obedience not only in life but in death, and a state capable of turning that expectation into clay, bronze, timber, earth, and human labour on a staggering scale.

The book is written for the general reader, and this makes it very accessible. Man moves easily between archaeology, biography, travel writing, and historical explanation. His prose is clear, the pace is good, and he gives enough background for readers who may know little about early imperial China. This is not a dense academic excavation report, nor does it pretend to be one. It is popular history, but popular history of a useful kind: informed, lively, and broad enough to make the reader understand why the terracotta army matters.

From my viewpoint, the obvious comparison is with Arthur Cotterell’s book on the First Emperor. Cotterell’s account is older, more compact, and more directly centred on Qin Shi Huang and the archaeological discovery itself. It has the advantage of being closer to the period when the find still felt new and astonishing to Western readers. There is a freshness to that kind of book. Cotterell gives the reader the emperor, the tomb, and the wonder of the discovery in a straightforward and focused way.

Man is doing something different. Compared with Cotterell, his book is less a discovery narrative and more a historical interpretation. Cotterell explains the wonder of the First Emperor and his buried army; Man tries to explain the world that made such a thing possible. Cotterell is probably the cleaner introduction if the reader wants a direct account of Qin Shi Huang, the tomb, and the army. Man is the richer book if the reader wants to understand the terracotta army as evidence of empire, state formation, military organisation, standardisation, and imperial control.

That distinction matters. The terracotta army can easily be reduced to a tourist image: thousands of impressive figures, each apparently individual, standing in underground ranks. Man pushes beyond that image. He asks what such a project tells us about Qin society. Who commanded? Who built? Who laboured? What kind of state could organise such a thing? What kind of ruler would imagine that an army should follow him into the afterlife? These are the questions that give the book its value.

The limitation is that Man’s storytelling sometimes runs ahead of the evidence. He writes with confidence and narrative force, and at times the motives and atmosphere of the Qin world can feel more firmly reconstructed than the surviving sources really allow. This is not a fatal weakness, but it should be kept in mind. The book is best read as a well informed popular history rather than as the final scholarly word on the subject.

For wargamers and military history readers, Man’s book is particularly useful because it treats the terracotta army as a representation of organised force. The figures invite questions about rank, equipment, formations, command, weapons, and the symbolic meaning of military order. They are not just statues. They are a clay model of state violence and imperial discipline. In that sense, Man’s broader approach is especially valuable. He helps the reader see the army not merely as an archaeological marvel, but as part of the same system that conquered and unified the Warring States. It also explains why the subject has long appealed to me as a possible wargaming project. A Qin army offers discipline, mass, visual drama, political context, and a clear military identity. I have always wanted to put one together on the tabletop, even if the project has remained waiting in the background while other armies and books took priority.

Overall, The Terracotta Army is a strong and worthwhile book. It is vivid, accessible, and more ambitious in scope than a simple account of the discovery. Cotterell remains useful as a tighter and more direct introduction to the First Emperor and the original archaeological excitement, but Man offers the broader interpretation. For me, that makes Man the more rewarding read, especially now that I am coming back to the subject through Cotterell, museum exhibitions, wargaming possibilities, and a continuing interest in the military and political systems of the ancient world. It is not only a book about what was found, but about what the find tells us about empire, war, labour, and power.

Cotterell gave me the original framework for understanding the First Emperor and the discovery; the Melbourne Museum gave the warriors physical presence; the Museum of Western Australia exhibition late last year renewed that interest; and Man provides the larger historical meaning. For readers interested in ancient armies, imperial power, wargaming possibilities, or the birth of unified China, Man is probably the more useful and more thought provoking book.

G. Hermon Gill’s two volume Royal Australian Navy is one of those works that sits quietly but firmly at the centre of Australian military history. It is not a casual naval adventure narrative, nor is it simply a collection of ship actions. It is the official account of the Royal Australian Navy in the Second World War, published as part of Australia in the War of 1939–1945, Series 2, Navy. The first volume, Royal Australian Navy 1939–1942, appeared in 1957, and the second, Royal Australian Navy 1942–1945, followed in 1968. Together they form the foundational published history of the RAN’s wartime service.

This is precisely why the set has remained so desirable for me. I had been trying to get hold of a copy for some time, but the price was generally prohibitive. When this set appeared on eBay at a reasonable price, I jumped at it. There are books one buys merely to read, and there are books one buys because they anchor a whole area of study. Gill’s Royal Australian Navy belongs in the second category.

Gill was well placed to write it. He was a mariner, journalist, naval officer and war historian, and during the war he worked closely with naval historical records. In 1944 he was chosen to write the naval volumes of the official history.

That background matters. The books have the solidity of official documentation, but they are not without narrative movement. Gill writes with an eye for operations, personalities, ships, policy and consequence. He understands that naval history is not only about battles. It is also about routes, convoys, logistics, alliance obligations, political choices, ship availability, and the hard reality of being a middle sized navy operating within a global war.

The first volume covers the period from the outbreak of war to March 1942. This was the phase in which Australian naval commitments were scattered across distant seas: the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The second volume continues the story through to 1945, following the RAN as it operated alongside British and American allies, while Australia’s strategic circumstances changed dramatically after Japan entered the war. The Australian War Memorial’s description of the second volume rightly emphasises that Gill places naval operations against the broader background of political and military policy.

Its place in Australian military history is therefore considerable. For the Army, readers often turn first to Long, Gavin Long’s official series, or to the campaign volumes on Greece, Crete, Tobruk, New Guinea and Borneo. For the Air Force, the official histories provide their own essential foundation. For the Navy, Gill is the equivalent starting point. Later authors have added detail, correction, interpretation and specialist studies, but Gill remains the base from which much subsequent work begins. Anyone seriously interested in the RAN during the Second World War eventually has to deal with these volumes.

The strength of the work lies in its breadth and authority. Gill covers major warships, small ships, convoy work, distant deployments, losses, administration, strategy, and cooperation with larger Allied navies. The RAN appears not as a footnote to British or American naval power, but as an Australian service stretched across several theatres and forced to operate beyond the narrow limits of national waters. That is one of the great values of the work. It reminds the reader that Australia’s naval war was never simply local. Australian ships and sailors were present wherever imperial obligation, alliance strategy and national survival required them.

The limitation is the limitation of most official histories of its period. It reflects the scholarship, access, assumptions and tone of the decades in which it was written. Some later archival work, operational analysis and social history has moved beyond it. It is also not always the easiest read for someone seeking a modern narrative style. At times it is dense, procedural and official in tone. Yet that is also part of its value. Gill was not writing a popular retelling. He was constructing a record.

For me, the appeal of this set is partly practical and partly historical. It is a reference work, but it is also a monument to the way Australia once recorded its wars. The volumes belong to a generation of official history that tried to be comprehensive, serious and national in scope. They sought to ensure that Australia’s role was not swallowed by the larger histories of Britain and the United States. That alone gives Gill’s work continuing importance.

Royal Australian Navy is not a book I would recommend as light reading, but I would regard it as essential for anyone with a serious interest in Australian naval history, the Second World War, or the development of Australian military historiography. It is a work to consult, return to, argue with, and build upon. Finding a reasonably priced set after looking for some time makes the acquisition feel even more satisfying. Some books are worth waiting for. This is one of them.

This is not a book I would normally have picked up. Prehistoric Britain is not usually one of my main areas of interest, and older works of archaeology can be difficult reading when so much of the scholarship has been overtaken by later discoveries, better dating methods, and a very different understanding of early human societies. However, the copy I found was sitting in a free bin at my local thrift shop, and for that price it seemed worth rescuing.

First published in 1922, Ancient Man in Britain is best read today not as a reliable guide to the current state of knowledge, but as a book that captures a particular moment in the history of scholarship. Mackenzie writes with the confidence and assumptions of his period, drawing together archaeology, anthropology, folklore, migration theories, and racial categories in a way that modern readers will often find outdated, and at times uncomfortable. That does not make the book useless, but it does change the reason for reading it.

It is a difficult book to rate in the usual sense, because so much depends on what the reader expects from it. As a guide to ancient Britain, it has clearly been overtaken by modern scholarship. Archaeology has moved on, dating methods have improved, genetics has transformed many older assumptions about population movement, and the language once used to describe ancient peoples now often feels dated or misleading. Judged purely as a modern work of prehistory, the book cannot really compete with more recent studies.

Yet that is not the only way to read it. As a study in the history of ideas, Ancient Man in Britain becomes far more interesting. It shows how an earlier generation tried to organise limited evidence into a broad story of human development, migration, belief, and culture. Mackenzie writes from within the intellectual world of his own time, and that world is visible on almost every page. The confidence of the interpretation, the assumptions about race and cultural progress, and the willingness to build large theories from fragmentary evidence all reveal as much about early twentieth century scholarship as they do about the ancient past.

For the general reader, the book is uneven. Some passages remain interesting because of their descriptive power and enthusiasm for the subject. Others now feel heavily superseded, especially where older theories about race, migration, and cultural origin dominate the interpretation. Anyone coming to the subject for accurate, up to date information on prehistoric Britain would be far better served by a modern introduction. As a historical document, however, it has its own appeal.

What I found most useful was not the detail of the argument, but the reminder that scholarship itself has a history. Books like this show how each generation builds its picture of the past from the tools, assumptions, and evidence available to it. Some of that picture survives. Much of it does not. In that sense, Ancient Man in Britain illustrates a point in time as much as it explains a period of time.

That is where the book has value even when it is wrong. It reminds the reader that scholarship is never fixed. Each generation inherits evidence, assumptions, methods, and blind spots, and then builds its version of the past from them. Some conclusions endure, some are revised, and some are abandoned altogether. Reading Mackenzie today is therefore an exercise in double vision. One reads past him to the ancient world he is trying to describe, but also reads him as a product of his own scholarly age.

I would not recommend it as a first book on ancient Britain, nor as a dependable source for modern archaeological understanding. I would recommend it to readers interested in the history of ideas, older antiquarian writing, or the way early twentieth century writers tried to make sense of prehistory. It is a book worth reading with caution, but also with some sympathy. Its real interest now lies not simply in what it says about ancient man in Britain, but in what it reveals about modern man trying to understand him a century ago.

Rating with a “history of ideas” lens, it is a great window into the “history of history”.

The Tweede Luitenant der artillerie (Second Lieutenant) team required when playing Bolt Action is below.

Tweede Luitenant der artillerie show with the first AA Gun.

The final two AA Guns, crews and mules will be completed over the next few days.

THE PAINTING TABLE

The Mantic gun emplacements shown yesterday.

KNIL WW2 AA Platoon with command and three guns.

Gun and crew (2)

Gun and crew (3)

4 spare figures to make each of my units 12 strong to use as Colonials for “Men Who Would Be Kings”, and another command team.

A third squad of KNIL infantry with lewis machine gun. I hope to finish all of these over the next week.

BOOK REVIEWS

There are five more books read, but waiting upon a review

SOME WRITTEN WORK AWAITING COMPLETION

The second book in this series is almost complete – just awaiting final editing.

The story of the sisters Chan and Mook, who saved Thalang (Phuket) from the Burmese invasion of 1785. This one has been a challenge with most of the source material written in Thai. A lot more checking, editing and illustrative work required to finish.

This one is a revision of an old document which needed significantly updating with the proliferation of AI use in writing these days. I am a few weeks off getting this one out.

Those in the pipeline are “Operation Hackney“ about the Australian WW2 invasion to retake Goodenough Island, “Between Empire and Survival” about the WW2 Thai/Vichy French War, and further down the track “The Aceh War 1873 – 1913”, for which I have only drafted the outline. All have only working titles at the moment.

WHO SAID RETIREMENT WAS BORING!

Thanks to “Chattie” for helping me with the “self portrait”!

Having finished the mantic Alien plants it is time to move on their “Necron style” walls. gun emplacements and artefacts.

There are two sizes of walls one shown.

Wall corners

I intend to glue these as “buildings” on bases to avoid an early “collapse” on the tabletop.

Artefact that can be used as a portal (above)

Or with an alien creature entering

Not usre what I will do with these “stelae” but an avenue seems likely.

These can be used for anything from objectives to force generators and anything in between!

The gun towers have been assembled and part painted.

This one is almost completed.

These are not a priority but will be put together in due course.

The Lost City of Z by David Grann is not my normal reading material, but it proved far more valuable than I expected. On the surface it is the story of Colonel Percy Fawcett, the British explorer who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925 while searching for what he believed was a lost ancient civilisation. Yet the book is more than a simple tale of jungle adventure. It is part biography, part historical investigation, part travel narrative, and part study of obsession. Grann follows Fawcett’s career, his repeated expeditions into South America, his growing belief in the existence of the city he called “Z”, and the later attempts by others to solve the mystery of his disappearance. The book was published in 2009 and later became the basis for the 2016 film of the same name.

What makes the book useful is not merely the mystery, but the way Grann places exploration inside its proper historical setting. Fawcett belonged to that last generation of imperial explorers who operated between science, ambition, nationalism, romance and personal madness. He was not simply wandering into blank spaces on a map. He was moving through lands already occupied, already known to Indigenous peoples, and already shaped by their own histories. That is one of the strengths of the book. It shows both the courage and the arrogance of the explorer tradition, and it reminds the reader that the so called unknown world was rarely unknown to those who lived there.

For those interested in the lost valley pulp genre, this is invaluable material. The usual pulp ingredients are all here: the vanished expedition, the hidden civilisation, the dangerous jungle, hostile terrain, rival theories, strange rumours, unreliable maps, and the sense that beyond the next river bend there may be something extraordinary. Yet Grann’s account is grounded enough to make those elements more useful rather than less. He shows how real exploration was slow, uncomfortable, hungry, diseased, confused and often badly planned. That is precisely what pulp adventure needs if it is to feel more than theatrical. The jungle should not simply be scenery. It should be an active force. Rivers, insects, heat, sickness, distance, hunger, bad information and cultural misunderstanding all become enemies in their own right.

The book is also a warning against making explorers too clean or heroic. Fawcett is fascinating because he is difficult. He is brave, determined and often more open minded about Indigenous societies than many of his contemporaries, but he is also obsessive, stubborn and capable of dragging others into danger because of his own certainty. That tension is useful for gaming and fiction. A good lost valley campaign should not only ask whether the explorers can survive. It should also ask why they are there, what they think they are entitled to take, and what price others pay for their ambition.

Grann’s own journey into the Amazon gives the book a second layer. He is not content simply to retell Fawcett’s story from old papers. He follows the trail, interviews people, examines competing explanations, and brings modern archaeology into the discussion. The result is a book that keeps the romance of the lost city myth while also challenging it. The possibility that the Amazon once supported complex societies gives Fawcett’s dream a stronger basis than simple fantasy, but Grann avoids turning that into cheap adventure spectacle. He is interested in how myth, evidence and obsession feed one another.

As a piece of reading for the lost valley pulp genre, The Lost City of Z is probably more useful than many actual pulp novels. It gives the designer or writer a storehouse of practical atmosphere: expedition planning, supply failure, unreliable guides, rumours of ruins, river travel, disease, exhaustion, jungle navigation, and the slow collapse of confidence. More importantly, it gives a sense of how the lost world genre can be handled with more depth. The best pulp adventure is not just men in hats shooting at monsters. It is the collision between ambition, fear, greed, scholarship, myth and landscape.

This is not a book I would have normally picked up for pleasure reading alone, but I am glad I did. For anyone writing or designing lost valley adventures, jungle expeditions, vanished civilisations or pulp exploration games, it is essential background reading. It provides the romance, but also the mud beneath it. That is what makes it so valuable.

I picked up Jonathan King’s Great Battles in Australian History in a thrift shop, more out of curiosity than expectation. My first instinct was to turn to the contents page and see what had been included and, just as importantly, what had been left out. Books with titles like this always invite that sort of reaction. They make a bold promise, and anyone with an interest in Australian military history immediately begins making their own private list of the battles that simply must be there.

To my surprise, I was impressed.

That does not mean I agreed with every choice, nor that the book is without its limitations, but I was struck by the sheer range of battles King managed to bring together. The book is not confined to the usual sacred ground of Gallipoli, the Western Front, Kokoda and Long Tan, although those familiar names are naturally present. Its strength is that it attempts to place Australian fighting experience into a much wider frame, moving across different periods, wars, theatres and types of conflict. For a general reader, and even for a reader who already knows a fair amount of the ground, this gives the book more value than I expected when I first picked it up.

King writes in an accessible, popular history style. This is not a dense academic study, and it is not trying to be one. The chapters are designed to be read as individual battle narratives, with enough background to explain why the action mattered and enough personal detail to keep the human element in view. That approach will not satisfy readers looking for a heavily footnoted operational analysis, but it does make the book readable. In many ways it is the sort of book that can be dipped into, read out of sequence, and used as a prompt for further reading.

One of the book’s real strengths is the breadth of each entry. While it is not a detailed exposé of every battle, nevertheless each action is covered in adequate depth for the reader wanting an overview with some detail. King does not simply name a battle, give a quick summary, and move on. In most cases he provides enough surrounding context for the reader to understand where the battle fits within the larger campaign or historical moment. The entries are necessarily brief, because the book covers so much ground, but they are not bare sketches. Each one generally gives the reader the background, the main action, the key personalities, and some sense of consequence. That makes the book more satisfying than a simple catalogue of battles, and it allows a reader to come to an unfamiliar action and still leave with a reasonable grasp of why it mattered.

The title does carry a problem. “Great battles” is always a loaded phrase. Great in what sense? Great because of scale, consequence, sacrifice, heroism, memory, or national mythology? Australian military history has often been shaped by commemoration as much as analysis, and a book like this inevitably sits inside that tradition. Some inclusions feel obvious, while others raise interesting questions about what counts as an Australian battle. There is also the broader issue of what Australian history chooses to remember as battle, and what it leaves in the margins. Frontier conflict, irregular warfare, naval actions, air operations, peacekeeping and coalition warfare all sit uneasily beside the familiar infantry centred Anzac narrative.

That said, King deserves credit for attempting breadth. A narrower book would have been easier to write and probably safer. Instead, this one gives the reader a broad sweep of Australian fighting experience, and that alone makes it useful. It encourages comparison between battles that are often treated separately and reminds us that Australian military history is not a single story but a collection of different experiences, fought in different places, under different conditions, and for very different reasons.

The book is at its best when read as an introduction rather than a final word. It opens doors. It gives the reader a sense of sequence, importance and drama, but it should not be mistaken for the last authority on any one battle. Some chapters inevitably feel compressed, and specialists will find places where they want more context, more argument or more engagement with recent scholarship. That is the price of covering so much ground in one volume.

For me, the pleasure of the book lay in the fact that it was better and broader than I expected. I began by looking for omissions. I ended by appreciating the ambition. A thrift shop find is always a small gamble, and this one paid off. Great Battles in Australian History is not a definitive military history of Australia, but it is a worthwhile and readable survey of many of the battles that have shaped the Australian military imagination. It is a useful book for the general reader, a handy refresher for the enthusiast, and a good starting point for anyone wanting to think more seriously about which battles Australia remembers, and why.