Christopher Duffy - Siege Warfare Vol. 2; The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great 1660-1789 (1985).jpg

Christopher Duffy read history at Balliol College, Oxford and joined the staff of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1961, becoming Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies and International Affairs. He was Secretary-General of the British Commission for Military History, a Vice-President of the Military History Society of Ireland, and a member of the Fortress Study Group. After many years at Sandhurst he went on to become Research Professor in War in History at the Institute for the Study of War and Society at De Montfort University before he retired from academic life, but fortunately not writing. He wrote two very popular books for the Napoleonic period on the battles of Austerlitz and Borodino. Studies at Sandhurst were developed into excellent books like Red Storm over the Reich for the World War Two period. His interest in fortifications led to a general survey, Fire & Stone, the Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860, as well as two more detailed books, Siege Warfare, The Fortress in the Early Modern World 1494-1660, and The Fortress in the Age of Vauban and Frederick the Great, 1660-1789. It is our hope that one day he have time to do another detailed study in fortress warfare to complete the trilogy.

While this would be an impressive collection of work, Christopher Duffy's preferred field has always been Eighteenth Century Warfare. He began with a life of Field Marshal Browne, called Wild Goose and Eagle, and went on to cover the armies of Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa. Russia got its turn with Russia's Military Way to the West: Origins and Nature of Russian Military Power 1700-1800, while the actual campaigns of Frederick were surveyed in Frederick the Great: A Military Life.

Christopher Duffy's first book for us was to go back and re-examine the Prussian Army in The Army of Fredrick the Great, 2nd Edition. The Emperor's Press had been attracted to his work by his ability to handle very detailed subjects while never losing sight of the bigger picture, all in a most readable style. He had to teach us a great deal of how to study history, especially the 18th Century.

However is next book for us was a continuation of his Russian work, Eagles over the Alps, Suvorov in Italy and Switzerland 1799. The staff here enjoyed immensely following Suvorov's trek over Alpine Passes on large scale maps, but on visiting the Panixer Pass found it much more daunting to do it over the actual ground. Christopher Duffy then went on to update his work on the army of Maria Theresa in Instrument of War, Volume 1 of The Austrian Army in the Seven Years War, a project we did jointly with the Austrian Army Museum (Heeresgeschichtliches Museum) in Vienna. Our rewards for this was a book we had always wanted to do, a more detailed look (but still very readable) at one history's greatest campaigns. The result was Prussia's Glory: Rossbach and Leuthen 1757, of which we are immensely proud. Another recent book by Christopher Duffy, sadly by another publisher, was 1745, a fresh look at the Jacobite campaign of 1745-1746.