[Sir John Theophilus Lee is portrayed in Child O'War] as an ingratiating nonentity…. His one substantial claim on the regard of posterity, apart from the memoir around which Child O'War is built, issues from a judiciously negotiated contract for the supply of lemon-juice to the navy.

A pretty slender target, you may think, for Mr. Garfield's bubble-pricking broadsides. But Lee's is by no means the only character to be raked, for little good is said of any of the actors in the revolutionary drama. Callous heads are hacked broadcast from fat, bemedalled bodies on both sides of the Channel; all politicians are pompous fools, or worse; only the First Consul himself is allowed—true to the multiple standards of our own time—to escape his due share of invective. Well, of course we all know that war is a rude game played by less elevated minds—but what...