The 'special power' of military history

'It remains the case that any pleasure to be derived by the general reader from military history is unlike the pleasure to be found in other forms of scholarship. It's not merely an addition to knowledge or insight into the past. Military history is ultimately about what men will put above life itself; what they will kill for and what they will die for. That is its special power.'

John Sexton, reviewing Anthony Beevor's Berlin: The Downfall, quoted in Publishing News