Battle & Aftermath

Culloden

A tremendous tale - one of the most dramatic in our island's history - and O'Keeffe tells it beautifully,

Fascinating, meticulously researched, often brutally detailed ... without being there, those times could not be more vividly brought to life than in this tremendous book

Brings the last battle on British soil to life with page-turning vivacity

A fascinating portrait of 18th-century Britain as an age of elegance and brutality... I recommend this book strongly

A fascinating portrait of eighteenth-century Britain as an age of elegance and brutality... I recommend this book strongly

Detailed, vivid - and not for the faint-hearted

Intensely readable... [and] vividly written

A vibrant and vivid tale, of victory, defeat, savage retribution and 'high' art... In our field one is often inclined to think or say, 'Do we really we need yet another book on Culloden?' However, if they are written as well and as excitingly as Paul O'Keeffe's...then the answer is a resounding 'Yes!'

Robert Woosnam-Savage FSA, Curator Emeritus, Royal Armouries, University of Leeds

'Excellent... It is a tremendous tale - one of the most dramatic in our island's history - and O'Keeffe tells it beautifully' The Times 
 
Charles Edward Stuart's campaign to seize the British throne ended with one of the quickest defeats in history: on 16 April 1746, at Culloden, his Jacobite army was overpowered in under forty minutes. Its brutal repercussions, however, endured for years, its legacy for centuries. 
 
Paul O'Keeffe follows the Jacobite army from initial victories to calamitous defeat. Exploring the battle's aftermath, he chronicles the Jacobite prisoners paying for their treason on block and gibbet while those granted 'the King's mercy' suffered the fate of forced labour on plantations in the colonies. While Stuart's cause eventually acquired an aura of romanticism, the Jacobite Rising remains one of the most bloody and divisive conflicts in British domestic history, which resonates to this day. 
 
'Detailed, vivid - and not for the faint-hearted' Financial Times 
 
'Fascinating, meticulously researched... tremendous' Daily Mail 
 
'Intensely readable... and vividly written' Neal Ascherson, London Review of Books

The Aftermath

Waterloo

TWO HUNDRED YEARS AFTER ONE OF HISTORY'S MOST PIVOTAL BATTLES and a dramatic retalling of its devastating aftermath.

If you buy one book to mark this Waterloo anniversary, buy this one

It is all here – and all told with the same verve, eye for anecdote and command of the material. This is a very good book, and a model of how narrative history should be written... anybody remotely interested in the battle should read

Invigorating and compelling

I was gripped by the wealth of detail and humanity in the book... This is how the tales of battles should be told, whatever the time, place or outcome

A grim story – but well worth the telling

What is truly gripping is the human horror, and the realization that what counts in war is not glory or patriotism, but victory, supremacy and the uncompromising need to prevail

Original and fascinating… If you buy one book to mark [the] anniversary [of Waterloo], buy this one

O’Keeffe describes these fraught, uncertain days with skill and a touch for ground-level detail... [He] has told in vivid colors a story that is often passed over in most narratives, but that is alive with drama and human tragedy

O’Keeffe has done a magnificent job tying up loose ends and telling a story that needed to be told

O’Keeffe brings an unjaundiced eye to what has been a well-told tale

After midnight, 19 June 1815... 
 
On the battlefield more than 50,000 men and 7,000 horses lie dead and wounded; the wreckage of a once proud French Grande Armée struggles in abject disorder to the Belgian frontier pursued by murderous Prussian lancers; and Napoleon Bonaparte, exhausted and stunned at the scale of his defeat, rode through the darkness towards Paris, abdication and captivity. 
 
In the days, weeks and months that followed, news of the battle shaped the consciousness of an age. Drawing on a multiplicity of contemporary voices and viewpoints, Paul O’Keeffe brings into focus as never before the sights, sounds and smells of the battlefield, of conquest and defeat, of celebration and riot.

The Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon

A Genius for Failure

A vivid and compelling biography of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846) - historical painter and polemicist, diarist, friend of the famous - and genius.

Haydon's story is essentially tragic but it has many elements of comedy, even high farce, and Paul O'Keeffe's biography brings the comedy to the fore with an enviable lightness of touch

Haydon's story is one of the great cautionary tales in art history, and it still has the power to shock, even after 150 years: there is barely a page in Paul O'Keeffe's new biography on which this reviewer has not written in the margin either "oh no" or "Oh God"...O'Keeffe's book largely refrains from psychological speculation, and I can't decide whether that's a good thing. What is definitely a good thing, though, is the way Haydon's tragedy is presented as a human story, with many down-to-earth facts

O'Keeffe has produced a fascinating study of a forgotten life that is rich in detail for fans of period drama

tactful and unobtrusive ... Hayden steps forth, as full of colour and bluster as ever, but with dignity as well as absurdity, and a perspicacious, as well as biting, tongue

This excellent book- beautifully written and well researched - recalls a man who ought not to be forgotten

Paul O'Keeffe is a freelance lecturer and writer based in Liverpool. He gained his Ph. D. with a scholarly edition of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr, and won critical acclaim with his 2000 study of Lewis, Some Sort of Genius.

* Haydon's first attempt at suicide ended when the low calibre bullet fired from his pistol fractured his skull but failed to penetrate his brain. 
* His second attempt also failed: a deep slash across his throat left a large pool of blood at the entrance to his studio, but he was still able to reach his easel on the opposite side of the room. 
*Only his third attempt, another cut to the throat which sprayed blood across his unfinished canvas, was successful. He died face-down before the bespattered 'Alfred and the First British Jury', his final bid 'to improve the taste of the English people' through the High Art of historical painting. 
* Such intensity, struggle and near-comic inability to succeed encapsulate Haydon's career. Thirty years before his death his huge, iconic paintings had made him the toast of early 19th-century London, drawing paying crowds to the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for months and leading to nationwide tours. 
* However, his attempt to repeat such success three months before his death was to destroy him: barely a soul turned up, leaving the desperate painter alone, humiliated, and facing financial ruin. 
* In A Genius for Failure Paul O'Keeffe makes clear that the real tragedy of Haydon lay in the extent to which his failures were unwittingly engineered by his own actions - his refusal to resort to the painting of fashionable portraits, for example, and his self-destructively acrimonious relationship with the RA. 
* The company he kept - Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington, among many others - and the momentous events he lived through - The Battle of Waterloo, the Coronation of George IV, and the passing of the first Parliamentary Reform Bill - make A Genius for Failure not only the definitive biography of this fascinating and tragic painter, but a stirring portrayal of an age.

A Life of Wyndham Lewis

Some Sort Of Genius

'Magnificent.This will be the definitive biography of Lewis for decades to come.'  Lawrence Rainey, Independent

Paul O'Keeffe is a freelance lecturer and writer based in Liverpool.  He gained his Ph. D. with a scholarly edition of Wyndham Lewis's Tarr.

page in front of him, testify to his final, triumphant burst of creativity. for what precisely it would be remarkably difficult to say.'  Painter and draughtsman, novelist, satirist, pamphleteer and critic, Lewis's multifarious activities defy easy categorisation.He launched the only twentieth-century English avant garde movement, Vorticism, in 1914.  His first novel, Tarr, was published in 1918.  During the intervening World War, as an artillery officer at the third battle of Ypres, he gained his 'political education under fire'.  Anti-war books of the 1930s argued against what he regarded as a war-mongering left-wing orthodoxy, and presented the case for the right.  This placed him in the position somewhere between an advocate of appeasement and what looked uncomfortably like a Nazi sympathizer.  Despite an admission, in 1939, that he had been wrong about Hitler, his reputation never recovered from the stigma of Fascism.After the Second World War, spent in penniless and bitter exile in Canada, he returned to London and, in the last decade of his life, received some measure of the success and recognition he had been denied for so long.  It coincided, tragically, with the realisation that he was going blind.  Visual expression denied him, he devoted all his remaining energies to writing.  Seven books in as many years, written in laborious longhand when he was unable to see the

Paul O'Keeffe

A gripping read, full of fascinating insights into the skills and mechanisms involved as well as deeply moving vignettes of the heroism and tragedy played out on that fateful October day. Brilliant

If you think you know it all about the battle of Trafalgar, think again. Paul O’Keeffe’s new book is full of fascinating information that few readers will have come across before … His book is a must for Trafalgar fans

A captivating and comprehensive read. The reader is immersed in the brutal moment by moment action of the battle itself, whether it's on the deck dodging tumbling ropes and blast fragments, or below at the shoulder of the surgeon and all his raw work saving lives almost blasted to pieces.  We ride with the messengers who bring the tidings of victory from the coast to the heart of London and beyond. And then the creation of memorials, as complex a process then as it is today, each one reminding us that we still live in the aftermath of Trafalgar

I was gripped by the wealth of detail and humanity in the book... This is how the tales of battles should be told, whatever the time, place or outcome

It is all here - and all told with the same verve, eye for anecdote and command of the material. This is a very good book, and a model of how narrative history should be written... anybody remotely interested in the battle should read

A tremendous tale - one of the most dramatic in our island's history - and O'Keeffe tells it beautifully

A vibrant and vivid tale, of victory, defeat, savage retribution and 'high' art ... In our field one is often inclined to think or say, 'Do we really need another book on Culloden?' However, if they are written as well and as excitingly as Paul O'Keeffe's...then the answer is a resounding 'Yes!'

A vivid and visceral portrayal of the most famous naval battle in history, focusing on the human cost of war, by a brilliant military historian 
 
At or about 1.15 in the afternoon of 21 October 1805, Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson was struck by a 22-gramme, 15-millimetre French musket round fired down from the mizzen top of the Redoutable, a distance of some 70 feet to HMS Victory’s quarter deck. It nicked the edge of his epaulette, and passed diagonally down, through the material of his coat and into the left shoulder, fracturing the upper part of the scapula or shoulder blade, then the second and third rib. It pierced the left lung, dividing a branch of the pulmonary artery, and emerged to sever the spine, splintering the sixth and seventh vertebrae above and below as it crashed between. The soft lead ball – distorted by collisions with bone – ended its flight embedded in muscle two inches below the right scapula. 
 
In this fresh and visceral retelling of the battle of Trafalgar, Paul O’Keeffe traces the course of events both prior and subsequent to that fatal shot: from about 6.30 in the morning, as the British ships began their slow approach towards the combined French and Spanish fleet, until the cessation of firing that followed the apocalyptic destruction of the French 74-gun Achille at 5.45 in the afternoon. 
 
But we also learn about the battle’s dramatic aftermath: how a violent storm that raged for eight days destroyed the surviving French and Spanish ships and drowned more sailors than had been killed during battle; how news of victory travelled and was celebrated in London; how Nelson’s body was brought home and given a spectacular funeral. 
 
Paying meticulous attention to the peripheral – and little explored – details, O’Keeffe gives us a front-row view of events; and in his unflinching portrayal of the brutal reality of naval warfare, he tells the story of the human cost of war. Gripping and immersive, this is a unique account of Trafalgar for a new generation of readers.

Paul O'Keeffe

Praise for Trafalgar

A gripping read, full of fascinating insights into the skills and mechanisms involved as well as deeply moving vignettes of the heroism and tragedy played out on that fateful October day. Brilliant

If you think you know it all about the battle of Trafalgar, think again. Paul O’Keeffe’s new book is full of fascinating information that few readers will have come across before … His book is a must for Trafalgar f ...

A captivating and comprehensive read. The reader is immersed in the brutal moment by moment action of the battle itself, whether it's on the deck dodging tumbling ropes and blast fragments, or below at the shoulder ...

A gripping read, full of fascinating insights into the skills and mechanisms involved as well as deeply moving vignettes of the heroism and tragedy played out on that fateful October day. Brilliant

If you think you know it all about the battle of Trafalgar, think again. Paul O’Keeffe’s new book is full of fascinating information that few readers will have come across before … His book is a must for Trafalgar f ...

A captivating and comprehensive read. The reader is immersed in the brutal moment by moment action of the battle itself, whether it's on the deck dodging tumbling ropes and blast fragments, or below at the shoulder ...

A gripping read, full of fascinating insights into the skills and mechanisms involved as well as deeply moving vignettes of the heroism and tragedy played out on that fateful October day. Brilliant

If you think you know it all about the battle of Trafalgar, think again. Paul O’Keeffe’s new book is full of fascinating information that few readers will have come across before … His book is a must for Trafalgar f ...

A captivating and comprehensive read. The reader is immersed in the brutal moment by moment action of the battle itself, whether it's on the deck dodging tumbling ropes and blast fragments, or below at the shoulder ...

Books by Paul O'Keeffe

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter