I finished reading Andrew Ayton and Philip Preston's The Battle of Crécy, 1346 and it's been a long time since a book has pulled the rug out from under me like this one has. Crécy has a bit of a reputation for being one of the more straightforward battles of the Hundred Years War and I've read a good few descriptions of the battle over a range of histories both military and political. What Ayton and Preston do in this book is really pull an Emperor's New Clothes and piont out that many of our assumptions about the battle are based on pretty dubious evidence, and many of the chroniclers traditionally held to be reliable aren't really so. At it's most brutal the book points out that in a lot of ways the most popular version of the battle history is just a nationalist Victorian perspective that's been patched up a bit by modern historiography.

I have some minor quibbles with it on the whole. I think the structure is a little off and while Ayton is a great writer I wish he included more sub-sections in two of the 70+ page chapters he wrote for this book just for my own ease of reference. The chapters are also not of equal quality. None of them are bad, but they ranged from telling me things I kind of already knew to blowing my goddamn mind.

On the whole I'd definitely recommend it, especially if you think you know anything about Crécy already but also if you're at all interested in attempting to reconstruct the events of late medieval battles. There's some really good perspectives here that really changed how I think about medieval military history as a field...

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The real problem with all of this is that I had initially read this book because I wanted to write a few pages on the combat between the English archers and the Genoese crossbowmen and I was hoping this book would help me brush up on my history of Crécy and provide some new information for me. I did not plan on it completely upending my perspective on the whole battle and leave me questioning everything I ever thought I knew about the subject...

Book I'm reading: J.H. Burns's Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought. An interesting if repetitive read (not for those easily bored by references to canon law). It's kind of amazing just how much of the theology of that period consisted of people literally making stuff up (looking at you, Donation of Constantine).

Book I like: Mark Kishlansky's Parlientary Selection. Provides an excellent background on how people actually got elected to the House of Commons in the early modern period.

Can anyone recommend a general history of Singapore, from independence to the modern day?

Can anyone recommend some books on the Cold War, the fall of The Soviet Union and the Rise of Putin?

I just started watching the final season of The Americans and am very interested in learning more about that time period.

Coming in a bit late, but...

Books I'm reading right now: Guadalcanal, by Richard B. Frank; and The Battle of the Atlantic 1939-1943, by Samuel Eliot Morison.

Guadalcanal is a pretty amazing read, particularly as you really get to see just how much the American army and navy are undergoing their learning curve during the campaign. One of my favourite parts is the Americans creating a sort of giant photo collage map of the island from reconnaissance flights, and then not being able to use it...because somebody put the wrong shipping address on it, and it got lost in the mail.

Morison is a very good read, even though he was writing early enough that most of the intelligence part of the picture is missing. The funny thing is that I was looking for sources on what the American navy did in the Battle of the Atlantic (I'm planning to write some articles about Greyhound, which is about an American destroyer in a convoy), and Morison was the only book I could find on it. British, Canadian, and German involvement is easy - but for some reason, American involvement involves a lot more hunting.