Current Reading

My recent reading - some of these will get fuller reviews in the course of time, but I've been busy and not had much time to write my blog.



Rifles by Mark Urban is a history of the 95th Rifles in Wellington's army fighting in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo. It is heavily based on the many accounts that came out of the unit and features descriptions of the soldiers' life in the unit and the rifle's part in various actions including the major battles at Bussaco and Waterloo and more minor ones that only involved the Light Division.

Urban concludes by discussing the growth of wider consciousness of the part that the Rifles and the Light Division played in the Napoleonic Wars for Britain leading to such things as Bernard Cornwell's hugely popular Sharpe series of novels. There is also a discussion of the impact on military thought and tactics from the Rifle's methods of fighting and the success of the British army against Napoleon's forces.



Mud, Blood and Poppycock is a revisionist history of the First World War, aiming to challenge the popular myths of how the war was fought in British culture. Corrigan's approach is quite technical in terms of using statistical analysis to disprove false perceptions like the numbers of casualties being massive and creating a lost generation. He does acknowledge the effect of the 'Pals Battalions' in leading to localised pockets where heavy losses did occur and that have heavily influenced the common perception of the war.


One book that I'm surprised he doesn't mention or list in his bibliography is Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, which was one of the first titles that I know of that did address the topic. Fussell is mainly an analysis of the copious literature of the First World war and the way this shaped the popular view.


I've still not finished Corrigan yet so I will probably return to discuss the subject of perceptions of World War One in a later post.

More miniatures pictures

The Minifigs hobgoblins from this  post, now cleaned up using Dettol.

Old Minifigs 25mm SF figures - Ceyhan Pinheads and Robomen.

I'm now going to strip the old Humbrol enamels off the SF figures and repaint them, I'll post pictures as I go.

Book Review: The Bloody White Baron - James Palmer

Insane, murderous and worshipped as a god, no not your humble reviewer, but the subject of The Bloody White Baron, Baron Ungern-Sternberg, an infamous White Russian commander in the Civil War.

This biography of Baron Ungern-Sternberg is James Palmer's first book. Ungern was born into the Estonian German nobility of the Russian Empire and seems to have had an awkward childhood being made to leave a number of schools before going to a military academy. He became a junior officer in the Imperial Russian Army with a cavalry regiment in Siberia, where he became fascinated by the Mongol and Buryat nomads. Due to disciplinary problems he was moved between regiments and sent away from active service with his violent behaviour remaining a problem through his life.

Ungern was recalled to the military with the outbreak of the First World War, gaining a reputation for reckless courage, but still being indisciplined. Under the Provisional Government he was sent back to Siberia to establish stable military units there before the October Revolution. Joining the White Russians in the Transbaikal region after the revolution he served under Semonov as part of the Siberian forces that undermined Admiral Kolchak's forces by stealing their supplies being sent across the Trans-Siberian railway.

Splitting from Semonov, Ungern lead a small army into Mongolia to drive out the Chinese. He eventually succeeded, setting the Bogd Khan as spiritual leader and becoming dictator. The Bolsheviks establishing control of Siberia started to attack Mongolia. Ungern's troops rebelled against his irrational cruelty as he led them against them, ending in his overthrow and capture by the Red Army.

Ungern's life, like that of many minor historical figures, suffers from being poorly documented which means that in places Palmer does have to speculate, but there is enough information used to avoid this being wild guesses. There is also a depiction of Mongolia and its history in the early Twentieth Century stuck between the Russian Empire and China, both of which had territorial ambitions over it and at times Palmer slips into writing a travel book about his research in Mongolia rather than concentrating on Ungern's life. I did find that this helped to give a sense of the region that the action occurred in. The writing is clear and tends to avoid being either academically dessicated or slipping into purple prose.

Palmer has chosen to try and portray the intellectual milieu of the Russian aristocracy in the period where Buddhism, Theosophy and pan-Asian ideas were popular and undoubtedly influenced Ungern. The discussion of Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism was interesting in showing aspects of Buddhist beliefs that are different from the usual western views of it as being a peaceful religion.

One irritation with the book is the lack of illustrations and only having two maps in the front it is hard to relate to some of Palmer's commentary on images of the protagonists or the terrain of Mongolia and Siberia. This criticism can also be applied to the descriptions of the Buddhist temples in Mongolia and China and the images of the warlike gods included. Footnotes have been used to show the sources and an index and bibliography are included.

Overall this is an interesting and entertaining biography of a figure that has maintained a shadowy presence in popular culture and I would recommend it.

World building - inspiration v perspiration

A post on James Malizewski's Grongardia blog has got me thinking about world building and the mixture of approaches that can be taken which I have called inspiration and perspiration. My definition of these is that inspiration is taking ideas and not ensuring that every little detail has been matched up and thought through or particularly not rejecting ideas as being out of place to readily. Perspiration is based on the painstaking development of the base concepts.

Of course pretty much any world building starts with a light bulb moment (the usual cartoon depiction of an idea), but after that there can be the divergent approaches of trying to construct a detailed, logically fleshed out setting with much perspiration or just detailing the immediately needed areas of the world and then improvising on the fly after that.

I suspect that the reason that the inspiration approach often produces more effective results is that it uses internalised knowledge of world building and existing settings that allows something that 'feels right' to be identified unconsciously. The other strength of the inspirational approach is that not elements in a world do make immediate sense or fit together in an obvious way allowing a more organic and realistic feeling with the setting.

Personally I've not been the biggest developer of my own worlds often preferring to detail an area in a published or historical setting such as Glorantha or the Wilderlands of High Fantasy, but even then I find that I can get things to fit together well, often from long experience of the setting. In Glorantha there is a much stronger sense of the world compared to the Wilderlands which has always had a fairly loose approach to anything like 'canon'.

I think my favourite source of inspiration is often listening to my players' comments as we are in a gaming session with that leading to me being able to create adventure hooks and seeds in the campaign and that can go on into other campaigns in that setting.