![The History of Warfare: Battle of Trafalgar - Nelson's Victory [DVD]](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/513IsiqVV4L._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
No doubt about it, this is an enormous kerb stone of a book- and very pretty it is. I am not going eulogise or go into a great deal of detail here - take your pick, there are 20 or more five star reviews to choose from - but I will comment that the actual battle does not appear until squeezed in between pages 469 and 524! So, really the battle is incidental rather than central to a rather rambling account covering everything about 'Nelsons Navy' from officers uniforms to flag signals to how to build a sailing warship.- oh, and a history of Nelson himself and his other battles pops up at regular intervals.
The trouble is that the author assumes the reader knows nothing and has bought this book for his coffee table because of the hoopla surrounding the bi- centenary of Trafalgar. The publishers could risk this lavish and largely irrelevant coverage because they were designing a popular book to sell in large numbers; it is very much a 21st Century product, where style and pretty pictures matter much more than original content. OK- this one does indeed have a great deal of detail- but no campaign ever fought has more material readily available about it than this one. For me undoubtedly the most impressive features here are the double page colour pictures of ships involved the battle- there are 12 of these and they are superb.
What really upsets me are the comments from other reviewers suggesting that Rif Winfields books on the sailing navy should be like this one. Winfield covered all the ships in the sailing navy over a 260 year period - an enormous task but one that has appeal to a modest specialized customer base, so a pretty picture book like 'Trafalgar Companion' would have bankrupted the publisher. I drop a star here because the advertised subject (that is, the battle) could have been told and actually in MORE detail, complete with nice colour pictures, for half the price: suffice to say that I'm not sure I needed to know that Nelsons eye patch was green.
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