Sharpe’s Fury: The Battle of Barrosa, March 1811: Book 11 (The Sharpe Series)

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Fury is the last Sharpe book to date that Cornwell has written. Cornwell has finish Sharpe's career arch a decade before in Sharpe's devil published in 1992 fury was published in 2006. The battle at the end of Sharpe's Fury is one of the most provocative in the series. But it's not Sharpe's fight because Wellesley is still in southern Portugal at the time. he should be behind the line of Torras Verdas watching the French starve. But the Battle of Barosa is one of the most important battles in the peninsular war. Cornwell being at least the foremost pop culture peninsular war scholar has a story to tell, he needed to tell it, and Sharpe has unfinished business with Lord Pumphrey from SHARPE'S PREY. so here we get the "filler thriller" Sharpe's Fury. the novel is broken into three distinct parts a device that worked well in the last book SHARPE'S ESCAPE but only served to break up the plot in Fury. this is the major flaw of the book. the Sharpe books have among other qualities a strong fast moving storyline. the major critic of the series is the plots are predicable and formulaic but I like them. maybe Cornwell was trying to switch things up. Once into Spain they are confronted and beaten by forces led by French Colonel Vandal, who's heading for Cadiz, and Sharpe is forced with a handful of men to go to Cadiz too.

Deliberately triggering the massive explosion that destroyed the fortress of Almeida (usually attributed to accident, combined with careless British handling of their munitions store); Cornwell describes military action brilliantly. He evokes all the sights and sounds and smells while managing to describe the fluctuations of the battle with enough vim to keep you in suspense...The Sharpe novels are wonderfully urgent and alive.' Daily Telegraph Sharpe is both a romantic and a womanizer. In Sharpe's Rifles, Harper notes that "He'll fall in love with anything in a petticoat. I've seen his type before. Got the sense of a half-witted sheep when it comes to women."Guess who gets to try to buy, steal or destroy those letters? Hint: one of them carries around a non-regulation sword and rose up from the ranks; another carries a seven-barreled volley gun and actually gets to use it a bit. And, you know, the rest of their friends. Taking command of a regiment in driving off the advance of the French Imperial Guard at the Battle of Waterloo (the regiments who actually held off the Imperial Guard are in the novel as well);

I think, without intention Bernard Cornwell has given me some life lessons through the entire Sharpe series....... Saving the Duke of Wellington from two assassination attempts in Paris (Cornwell explains that the first attempt happened, though the shooter simply missed, while the second is fictional and based on a likely deliberate fire that broke out in a house Wellington had been in days earlier). He’s a remarkable-looking fellow, don’t you think?” “To quote you, Your Grace, I don’t know what he does to the enemy, but by God he frightens me.”This book opens in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Waterloo, Sharpe and his men are sent into France to free a mysterious prisoner. The action then moves on to Paris, an uneasy and dangerous city in the wake of Napoleon’s defeat. It’s all good, solid ‘Boy’s Own’ stuff, though it doesn’t shy away from the brutality of 19th century warfare. This is the Richard Sharpe many of us have come to know and his advancement in rank hasn’t changed him: Sharpe straightened. “You see that dead man, Captain?” “Of course, sir.” “He was a damn fine soldier and a good friend. That man marched with me from Portugal to France, then came here, where some bastard voltigeur killed him. I owe him a grave, and I pay my debts. If you’re in such a hurry then you can climb off that bloody horse and help us.”" There is a fanatical priest who will stop at nothing, including murder, to make Spain free of both the French and the British. There is also the French officer who has his own twisted criteria of warfare who Sharpe has vowed to hunt down and put down. Later, Morris resigns his commission in disgrace rather than face a court martial, and Wellington confirms Sharpe's promotion to lieutenant-colonel, but expresses his surprise at Sharpe's decision to retire and hand command of the battalion to Peter D'Alembord, though Sharpe agrees to return to service in the future should Britain need him. Wellington then asks Sharpe if he had meant to kill or merely wound the Prince of Orange at the Battle of Waterloo. [N 2] Sharpe admits that he tried to kill the Prince, to which Wellington approvingly responds that it was "a damn fine miss." If you’re familiar with these books you’ll know there’s a formula. There will be an incompetent and/or cowardly officer, an ambitious young soldier or two, and the ever loyal Sergeant Harper. The story will climax in a set-piece battle against the odds in which Sharpe will triumph by a combination of skill, bravery and low cunning.

His intelligence work for Wellesley brings him the long-lasting enmity of the fictional French spymaster Pierre Ducos, who conspires several times to destroy Sharpe's career, reputation or life. In the late 1990s, early 2000s I worked my way through most of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels, so when he wrote another one after a gap of nearly 15 years it was always going to be on my to-read list.

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There isn't a great deal of fury going on in this eleventh (chronologically) Richard Sharpe novel, but at this point it must have started getting difficult to come up with titles? Maybe? And finally to Sean Bean, who introduced me to Sharpe as a 15 year old boy. I fell in love with the concept of a private soldier becoming an officer in the British army in a time when it did not happen that often. All in all, it's a 5* book, the excitement and anticipation of waiting for this book was well worth it, the story was great.

To avoid arrest, Sharpe takes the " King's shilling", joining the 33rd Foot, as a result of the blandishments of recruiting sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill. The regiment is first sent to Flanders in 1794, where Sharpe fights in his first battle, at Boxtel. The next year, he and his regiment are posted to India, under the command of the British East India Company. We are doing our utmost to keep Parisians calm. So try very hard not to start a war, Sharpe. Break some heads if you must, but I don’t want the streets of Paris running with blood.” In the winter of 1811; the Peninsular War is being won by the French; Cádiz is the only major Spanish town still holding out. From their strongholds in Portugal, the British sally forth to the River Guadiana with a small force seeking to break a key bridge across the river. The mission is commanded by the young Brigadier General Moon, a man with no love for the upstart rifleman, Sharpe. He meets disaster when Sharpe and the men with him encounter a brutal opponent in the French Colonel, Henri Vandal, commander of the 8th Regiment of the Line. Retreating from this first encounter, Sharpe and his small band are driven by Vandal into the fortress city of Cádiz, which is already besieged by the French. Prior to the Battle of Waterloo, Sharpe is appointed aide to the Prince of Orange, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Disgusted by the Prince's dangerous incompetence during the course of the battle, Sharpe deserts his post (making an attempt on the prince's life afterwards), but comes to the aid of his old regiment, steadying the line and preventing a French breakthrough. Wellesley then gives him command of the unit for the remainder of the battle ( Sharpe's Waterloo).It seemed unnatural to Sharpe. This was Paris! He had been fighting the French for twenty-one years in Flanders, India, Portugal, Spain, then in France itself, and now he was in the first group of British troops to enter the enemy’s capital, and it was nothing like his imagination. He had expected magnificence, but all looked normal, not that different from streets in some parts of London." More here, than in most of these novels, Cornwell takes the opportunity to have Sharpe reflect on his life both before, during and after his military service. This may not be the best of the series but the details of life in Paris during this period are very interesting. Sharpe is one of Cornwell’s iconic creations. He stands in for “everyman” who has been in the front lines of battle. It is his successes and the costs Sharpe has paid for those successes that constitutes the subtext of this volume. Cornwell published the non-fiction book Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles in September 2014, timely for the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. [2] Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.