The Independent Companies of Foreigners are widely regarded as the worst examples of foreign units in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars. They were formed, in the last years of these wars, to receive French deserters who had come over to the British in Spain. Each company was intended to serve separately in the garrisons of the West Indies. Instead two of them were used in an active role on the East Coast of America a " this did not turn out well. Drawing of British, French and American sources, this book provides a fuller picture of the men, why the units were formed, why they were used as they were and what actually happened. Judgement can then be made whether the bad reputation of the units, and the soldiers in them, is justified.

A St Helena Who's Who details the island of St Helena and its administration, including military, naval and civil offices as well as the overall population in the 1820s and expenses. A must have for Napoleon historians, this comprehensive book chronicles the residents of Longwood, the 'Who's Who' of St Helena and what flag-ships were stationed there. As well as listing the regiments based on the island such as the 53rd Foot Regiment (2nd Battalion) and artillery and engineers, Napoleon's visitors to the island are recorded as well as the chronology of his death, the construction of his tomb and reports on the post-mortem examination. Also, Sir Hudson Lowe and the East India Company involvement in the island are exhaustively covered as are stories of military figures, marriages and the abolition of slavery.

On January 30, 1889, at the champagne-splashed hight of the Viennese Carnival, the handsome and charming Crown Prince Rudolf fired a revolver at his teenaged mistress and then himself. The two shots that rang out at Mayerling in the Vienna Woods echo still.

Frederic Morton, author of the bestselling Rothschilds, deftly tells the haunting story of the Prince and his city, where, in the span of only ten months, "the Western dream started to go wrong." In Rudolf's Vienna moved other young men with striking intellectual and artistic talents--and all as frustrated as the Prince. Among them were: young Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, Gustav Klimt, and the playwright Arthur Schnitzler, whose La Ronde was the great erotic drama of the fin de siecle. Morton studies these and other gifted young men, interweaving their fates with that of the doomed Prince and the entire city through to the eve of Easter, just after Rudolf's body is lowered into its permanent sarcophagus and a son named Adolf Hitler is born to Frau Klara Hitler.