Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe

Tormented by agonising illness, British Major General James Wolfe was an unlikely hero. In 1759, however, he led a successful attack on French troops on the Plains of Abraham above Quebec, ensuring that Britain, not France, would become the dominant power in North America. By crippling French ambitions on the continent, Wolfe also paved the way for American independence from Britain. Wolfe won the Battle of the Plains of Abraham - but he lost his life on the battlefield. He was thirty-two years old. His death at the very moment of victory at Quebec gained him posthumous fame and veneration as a founding father of the British Empire, cementing his heroic status on both sides of the Atlantic. Epic paintings of Wolfe's dying moments transformed him into an icon of patriotic self-sacrifice and a role model for Horatio Nelson, the English admiral who fought in the Napoleonic Wars. Wolfe's reputation has recently undergone sustained assault by revisionist historians who cast him as a bloodthirsty and mediocre general who owed his fame to one singularly lucky - though crucial - victory.In the first full-length biography of Wolfe to appear in almost half a century acclaimed writer and historian Stephen Brumwell draws on a wide range of sources - many of them previously unpublished - to boldly and vividly reassess the life of a soldier whose short but dramatic life altered the course of world history.