I have been back from my trip to Australia for a month now. However, things have been busy and that is my excuse for failing to update the blog. This week I went up to Newcastle for a friend's inaugural lecture as Professor of Roman Archaeology. The week before I spent a couple of days in Lisbon doing interviews for the release of the Portuguese translation of my Fall of the West/How Rome Fell. When I was barely back from Down Under, I went up to Oxford to give a talk to the undergraduates of the Russell Society in my old College. All three have been very pleasant occasions in their different ways, but all the travelling has taken a lot of time. On the other hand, many an hour spent on trains, following on from the long flights and relaxing time on holiday in Australia, has given me a chance to do a fair bit of reading and so I thought that I would mention a few of the books.

William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal. The Fall of Delhi 1857 was recommended to me by a reader who e-mailed the website, and had anyway long been in my 'I must get round to reading that someday' list. Having finally got the chance, I have no hesitation on passing on the recommendation. It is a very good read and the author draws on many sources for the day to day life of the court and wider population of Delhi which have rarely if ever been exploited. The focus is quite narrow, and it has made me want to go and read more about some of the events and people who are treated in less detail or with a fairly broad-brush. A good history book always makes you want to read more about the period. Quite a few of the reviewers quoted on the jacket and inside note the author's often angry tone. It's always hard to tell from the selections chosen by publishers whether this was meant as compliment or not. Personally, I believe an historian should strive to be anonymous in their work, but that is a matter of taste. However, in this case, the story of the Indian Mutiny was itself so full of passion, fear and anger, that the author's mood at times almost reduces the very human - if often extremely brutal - mood of the participants. There is a danger that in condemning some of the acts and actors you make it harder to understand them. This is only a minor gripe with a excellent book.

Another enjoyble and provoking take on a familiar topic is Nick Foulkes Dancing into Battle: a social history of the Battle of Waterloo, which again I had been meaning to read for some time. Once again, it's very readable, and draws on a quite a lot of sources that have rarely been exploited. It's well worth reading if you like the period, or are simply a fan of Thackeray's Vanity Fair. For something more Australian in theme, I read and enjoyed Michael Molkentin's Fire in the Sky. The Australian Flying Corps in the First World War, which tells a less well known, but very interesting story and does it extremely well.

I have not read much new fiction recently, but did pick up Bernard Cornwell's The Fort. As expected this is a very good read, telling of an episode in the American War of Independence and featuring both a young John Moore as well as Paul Revere. Unlike his other books, there is not really a single, main hero, and instead it's a lively and vivid account of a campaign where an expedition sent up from Boston somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory through some lacklustre leadership. It may not be quite what fans expect, but I don't think they will be disappointed.