Military leaders ...

"Generals," by Mark Urban.

At first glance, this line-up of great British generals contains a number of serious omissions. Henry V, Oliver Cromwell, Garnet Wolseley and Bill Slim are all overlooked. Surely they were better field commanders than, say, George Monck, William Howe, Charles Gordon and J F C Fuller - all of whom feature in this book? Doubtless Mark Urban would agree. But this is not a book about great battlefield commanders per se; rather, it concerns generals "whose deeds have resonance, and provide some definite legacy, even today". Measured by these criteria, his selections make perfect sense.

Monck, for example, is not remembered for his battlefield prowess, though his speedy reduction of Stirling Castle in 1651 is proof of his military competence. Instead it was his bold decision to restore the monarchy in 1660 by means of military force, or at least the threat of it, that gives him "a more significant legacy" than even Cromwell, the undisputed master of the mid-17th-century battlefield.

The Duke of Marlborough's fighting credentials are not in doubt. He won no fewer than four great victories during the War of Spanish Succession - including Blenheim in 1704 - and laid the foundations for "two centuries of British greatness". His life, says Urban, was the "ultimate male fantasy": victorious in battle; on intimate terms with half of Europe's sovereigns; rich beyond his wildest dreams; and trained "in the arts of the boudoir from a veritable sexual Olympian" (Charles II's mistress, Barbara Villiers).

General Howe, commander of British troops at the outset of the American War of Independence, is the only one of Urban's choices who does not merit selection. He is included because he was a talented soldier who could, and probably should, have snuffed out the rebellion as early as 1777. His failure to do so, therefore, changed the course of history: not just in America but also in Europe, where France, bankrupted by its long involvement in the war, eventually succumbed to revolution. The argument is compelling, but it still leaves Howe's achievements as essentially negative.

The Duke of Wellington is Marlborough's only serious competitor for the title of Britain's greatest fighting general. Yet the sword he used to defeat Napoleon - a reformed British Army - was forged by a quite different and less celebrated general: HRH the Duke of York, youngest son of George III. Remembered today for marching 10,000 men up and down hills during the failed Low Country campaign of 1793-94, the Duke made his mark as a reforming commander-in-chief. "The very royal pedigree that had become a liability in his field command," writes Urban, "proved a vital asset when scaling the mountain of army reform, for it placed him and his mission above petty political vendettas."

"Chinese" Gordon is important, says Urban, because the British government's decision to send him to Khartoum in 1884 was the first example of "powerful men using media manipulation of public opinion to trigger war". I'm not sure I agree. Palmerston did much the same thing in the months prior to Britain's involvement in the earlier Crimean War, though the overall point about soldiers acquiring "mastery of the media" is well made.

Few British generals were more overtly "political" than Herbert Kitchener, the avenger of Gordon who was appointed war secretary in 1914. Alone among his cabinet colleagues, he envisaged a long war and the need to create a vast citizen army if Britain was to survive. Without this foresight, Britain and France might well have buckled in 1915.

The "most intellectually influential" general was J F C Fuller, the great military theorist who developed the doctrine of armoured warfare in 1917. The great irony of Fuller's career is that his ideas were adopted by just about every European army bar his own, with Hitler calling his panzer divisions "Fuller's children". But only Soviet Russia took Fuller's theory to its logical conclusion by creating a fully mechanised and armoured army, designed to destroy enemy concentrations rather than bypass them.

And so, finally, to Bernard Montgomery whose greatest achievement was not the turning of the tide in North Africa, though that undoubtedly allowed Britain a key role in the final defeat of the Nazis, but rather his role in bringing Britain's army into line with the new "geopolitical reality" of American ascendancy. "The age in which British generals directed great armies in major wars," writes Urban, "was over."

In a fascinating final chapter, Urban outlines some of the threads that connect his 10 subjects. The most successful were typically outsiders with something to prove, thick-skinned and iconoclastic. They were also politically adept, capable of "dealing successfully with the civilian holders of power". Non-political generals have, in Urban's opinion, "always come second or been disasters".

Publishers tend to discourage books like this, with their gimmicky titles and self-contained chapters. Yet Generals succeeds because of the quirkiness of Urban's subjects, the quality of his writing and the originality of his conclusions. It is a book that relies not on exhaustive research (no archives were consulted) but on perspective and sound judgment. In scanning the first three centuries of the modern British Army through the eyes of significant generals, Urban has made his own valuable contribution to military literature.