War Horses of Letters

The world's greatest gay, equine, military, epistolary romance.

These powerfully moving letters were exchanged between two of the most significant warhorses in history: the dignified Marengo, devoted bearer of Napoleon; and the dashing Copenhagen, a slightly flighty racehorse who became the warhorse of the Duke of Wellington.

Originally made public by the highly acclaimed BBC Radio 4 series starring Stephen Fry, Daniel Rigby and Tamasin Greig, this correspondence has melted the hearts of many, and surprised a great many more.

Now the maverick academics who painstakingly tracked down each yellowing, crumbling cache of letters, have arranged and edited them into book form, adding a wealth of learned hoofnotes full of fascinating factual facts that will deepen the reader's understanding both of Napoleonic history and that sadly neglected branch of academe horsethropology.

Some readers may think they notice lots of facts that are less factual, often much less factual. To those readers, we offer the wise words of Marengo himself:

"Open your minds, open your hearts, you have nothing to lose but your reins."

MARIE PHILLIPS is the author of Gods Behaving Badly, which has just been made into a film starring Sharon Stone and Christopher Walken. Her eponymous alter ego is an intellectually ruthless Galway beauty with a frosty heart who discovers and steals the first clue to the whereabouts of the Copenhagen and Marengo letters by shoving it down her cleavage, partly to keep it safe and partly because she knows this is the best way to steal things from the British Library. She can strip the engine of a vintage Benz in six minutes. She has a black belt. It is shiny. ROBERT HUDSON wrote the novel The Kilburn Social Club. In his other life, he is the truculent, dwarfish, part-time cryptologist and part-time hockey commentator, Dr Robert Hudson PhD, a child prodigy admitted to Apocryphal College, Cambridge, at the age of eight and expelled at the age of seventeen after an unfortunate incident during his search for the wimple of the Virgin Mary. Hudson's cryptographical expertise is much in demand, and he is often called away from his gay horse research to break codes and interpret symbols and stuff.