Product Description
Word count: 1685. ... Read more

Product Description
The acclaimed definitive history of the outlaws and "Border lords" who reigned on the contentious frontier between England and Scotland for three hundred years. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

The Steel Bonnets
Loved it!
This book is about the conditions on the "no man's land" between England and Scotland in the 1500's to the 1600's. However, this book can give you a very good understanding of what goes on in a modern day "failed state".
The politics, the economics, and the violence and lawlessness are very much the same as many other parts of the world in this century.
This could arguably apply to places like the border between Israel/Palestine or Pakistan/Afghanistan etc.

Rousing Brilliance
With all the focus on Scotland being tied to all things tartan, the peoples of the Borderlands often overlooked.George MacDonald Fraser paints a spectacular portal into the tumultuous life of the Border Rievers and all they came in contact with.The objective writing style favors neither Scotland nor England.He does not attempt to justify one side or the others action- it just is what it is.This approach fits in perfectly with the frequency in which loyalties and rivals switched sides and waged a blood feud that is still felt in parts today.Anyone who is remotely interested in anything associated with Scotland, England, organized crime or just a good history will bask in the wonder of this spectacular book.

A history of a turbulent area and era
Most of us think of Elizabethan Britain as a reasonably peaceful place. Shakespeare and Marlowe writing plays, Edmund Spenser writing "The Faerie Queen," Sir Francis Bacon inventing science to replace natural philosophy, the English Renaissance.

However, there was one part of Britain that underwent continuous terror and warfare, the Borders. The area lying around the border between Scotland and England was an almost lawless place. Great numbers of the people inhabiting the Border Marches lived by despoiling each other. The 16th Century was when great tribes feuded continuously among themselves, when robbery and kidnapping were everyday professions, when raiding, arson, murder and extortion were an important part of the social system. This had little to do with war between the two countries, who spent most of the century at peace with each other.Much of the raiding was not cross-border, but rather English attacking English and Scots stealing from other Scots.It was a way of life pursued in peace time, by people who accepted it as normal. The seamen of the first Elizabeth might sweep the world's greatest fleet off the seas, but for all the protection she could give to her Northumbrian peasants they might as well have been in Africa.

While the monarchs of England and Scotland ruled the relatively secure hearts of their kingdoms, the narrow hill land between was dominated by the lance and the sword. The tribal leaders from their towers, the broken men and outlaws of the mosses, the ordinary farmers of the valleys, in their own phrase "shook loose the Border."They continued to shake it as long as it was a political reality, practising systematic robbery and destruction on each other. History has named them the Border Reivers.

Fraser explains, in very well written words, how the situation on the Borders came about. He describes the manner of people who lived there, who were the leading robber families, how they lived and ate and dressed and built their houses and so forth. He tells how the reivers practised such crimes as the protection racket, robbery and cattle rustling. He also explains about the feuding that went on. He describes how Border law operated under the March Wardens and how the two governments tried to quell the reivers. Lastly the book tells how the reiving ended when England and Scotland came under one king, and the older Borders ceased to be.

Makes the Balkans look like a children's sandbox
THE STEEL BONNETS by George MacDonald Fraser is a prodigious and esoteric historical narrative about the Anglo-Scottish border. The time is the 16th century. The place and players are indicated by the book's subtitle, "The Story of the Anglo-Scottish Border Reivers", reivers being raiders. The place is more specifically the six administrative areas called Marches (3 English and 3 Scottish - West, Middle, and East on each side of the line) which straddled the border to serve as a buffer zone.

Having grown up in Carlisle, the former bastion of the English West March, Fraser has written a work of love divided into five parts. In the first three, Fraser describes the genesis of the Border Marches, the Wardens, one per March, that were responsible for the maintenance of order, the raider families that lived there, and the culture and practice of violence that characterized the area. The author's catalog of depredations, based on research of contemporary records, includes murder, arson, blackmail, kidnapping, rustling, racketeering, feuding, plunder, and banditry - all made infinitely worse by the indifference and/or cynical scheming of the English and Scottish central governments which tolerated the not-infrequent participation in the mayhem by the Wardens themselves. Part 4 is a sequential narrative history of events along the Border during the 16th century, the last before James VI of Scotland united the island's thrones as James I of Great Britain. Part 5 describes this monarch's brutal suppression of both the violence and raider families of the Marches during the first decade of the 17th century, an effort that finally brought peace to the region.

THE STEEL BONNETS offers a surfeit of detail. At times, as Fraser brings on stage the multitude of principal characters and attempts to unravel the maze of ever-shifting family alliances and feuds (Scot vs. Anglo, Scot vs. Scot, Anglo vs. Anglo, everybody vs. everyone), the reader may decide the author went over the top. However, the story is never uninteresting, and the social chaos is appalling.

If the reader was delighted by the humor in Fraser's other books, e.g. the McAuslan and Flashman series, there may be some disappointment as this narrative is relatively straitlaced. However, even here the author's dry wit occasionally shows. Regarding the assumption of the English East March Wardenship by Henry Carey in 1588:

"... his notion of Border justice was that the only good reiver was a dead one - a point of view which has much to be said for it. Possibly the fact that he suffered from gall-stones made him irritable, for he started in office as he meant to continue, by hanging Scottish thieves."

And, as always, Fraser's prose is a joy to behold, as demonstrated by his closing remarks:

"Only now and then, if your romantic imagination is sharp enough, there can come a little drift from the past ... most vivid of all, perhaps, in a little fellside village at night, when there is a hunter's moon and a strong wind, and the black cloud shadows hurry across the tops, and beasts stamp in the dark, and an inn door down in the village opens and slams with a blink of light, and the rough Norse voices sound and laugh and die away ... The old Border is buried a long time ago, and there is hardly a trace now to mark where the steel bonnets passed by."

Back-stabbing,double-crossing,treacherous,thieving..........
barbarous,murderous,anarchic, happenings on the Anglo-Scottish borderlands from the 13th through 16th centuries. It was Afghanistan with kilts. ... Read more

Product Description
Soldado. duelista. amante. canalla. impostor. cobarde. sinvergüenza. y la lista de singulares atributos podría seguir. Harry Flashman es un personaje inolvidable. con un talento innato para salvar el pellejo en el último instante y. además. conseguir que le cuelguen una medalla.Este libro. el primero de una serie que desde hace tiempo cautiva a los lectores de Estados Unidos. Inglaterra y España. comienza cuando Harry es expulsado de la escuela secundaría. tras haber colmado la paciencia del director. Es un breve infortunio. porque nuestro héroe se repone rápido e ingresa en la memorable compañía de húsares de Lord Cardigan. Al poco tiempo es destinado a Afganistán. donde hará su debut como agente secreto. Pero no puede decirse que lleve la fortuna consigo. Más bien lo contrarío. ya que le toca ser parte en uno de los episodios más vergonzosos de la historia del ejército británico: la desastrosa retirada militar de Kabul.Sin embargo. esto es apenas un detalle. Harry Flashman está más allá de las derrotas militares. incluso de las catástrofes. Su instinto de supervivencia neutraliza las calamidades. y lo deja siempre listo para aprovechar los placeres de la vida. aunque a veces tenga que hacer un esfuerzo y quebrar un tanto la ley. Cosas habituales en los verdaderos aventureros.Con una prosa encendida. y un don inusual para combinar calidad literaria y diversión de alto vuelo. George MacDonald Fraser ha escrito una novela excelente. excitante. impúdica y absolutamente entretenida. Al leerla uno entiende perfectamente el fanatismo que generaron las novelas protagonizadas por Harry Flashman. ... Read more

Product Description
George MacDonald Fraser, OBE (2 April 1925 – 2 January 2008) was a British author of both historical novels and non- fiction books, as well as several screenplays. ... Read more

Product Description
Five adventure novels from the period 1885-1924 in one volume, from the swashbuckling "The Prisoner of Zenda" to the science fiction classic "The Lost World". This book includes an introduction, bibliography and filmography by George MacDonald Fraser, historian and author of the Flashman novels. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Wonderful Adventure Anthology!! All Written in 1st Person!!
I bought this book (paperback)in Seattle, WA a few years at a half price book store.I LOVED IT and after reading all the stories, I sold it back to the book store!!! B-U-T I didn't realize just how unique it was and have been trying to locate a copy of it ever since!!All the stories are classics and ironically, the publisher compiled them such that all are written in first person, which normally I would avoid.HOWEVER, THIS ANTHOLOGY OF STORIES TRANSPORTS YOU IMMEDIATELY INTO THE AUTHORS' WORLD OF ADVENTURE AND YOU NEVER WANT TO LEAVE!!EXCELLENT READING FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY!!HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT! ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A mountain of talented mimicry and well shod charicatures
I apologize, first, for writing this in such a hurry. I'm in a pubilc library, waiting for a bus.

It's very difficult for me to criticize any of this authors works since almost all of his books have provided me with uncountable pleasure I cannot imagine finding anywere else. But my first impression of this work was that it was garbage beneath contempt and that my favorite author must have turned to cheap bhang for the long haul through the many, many, many pages written.

After several years collecting dust I returned to this book, hoping that perhaps I had been mistaken. Perhaps I had merely had a bad week. Perhaps it wasn't tripe but my frame of mind that made it seem so.

That turned out to be the case. Picking it back up and starting from the beginning I read it again with great pleasure. Several years later I read it again and enjoyed it very much for now (or then rather) I accepted it's over the top Monty Pythonesque charicatures. This is the story Graham Chapman wanted when he directed 'Yellowbeard'.

And Yellowbeard plays a part in this book as one of the charicatures, fortunately left mostly to growl and batter like a simian dwarf ball of fur. But his role, infinitely stereotyped as it is, is a minor one.

This book is an aggresive and impressive shock treatment of all of the stereotypes and charicatures of pyrates writ large. At first passing I found this intolerable because I simply could not accept the author I held so dear driving so deep into well manured fields of idiotic humour. But those fields are green and verdant and when you settle in and become accustomed to the smell of silage and the farm one really finds verdant pastures of humor and whit carried along successfully to the very end, a feat that seemed improbable, if not impossible, at the very begining.

So buy it, read it, and please have faith that you will not be dissapointed. ... Read more