Reminiscences of Captain Gronow

A soldier who danced with dukes and dodged Napoleon's cannons. Rees Howell Gronow lived at the intersect of history's most dramatic chapter, and his memoirs capture it all: the blood-soaked fields of Waterloo, the glittering salons of Regency London, and the opium-tinged nights of Paris under every regime from Louis-Philippe to Napoleon III. Gronow was a Grenadier Guards officer who fought alongside the Duke of Wellington himself, then lost his fortune, ran for Parliament, failed, and somehow kept dancing through it all. His prose crackles with the casual brutality of a man who watched friends die at Waterloo, then described their deaths in the same sentence as a society ball. This is not history from below or above, but from inside the waistcoat of a man who treated warfare and waltzing with equal sangfroid.