Dear Mr. Cornwell, After having become addicted to your Sharpe series, I checked your website only to find out that my guess was right there was something in the way you make the reader learn all these historical facts and details without even realising it which made me think that you must be either a teacher and/or historian. Maybe it was easy to spot since I am married to a German who is a teacher. My husband is a pacifist interested in military history, fascinated by the Napoleonic period; the literature he gathered to be able to paint his toy soldiers correctly made it easier for me to understand the difference between the different types of weapons described in your books. Who would have thought it that after 16 years of marriage I would suddenly share this interest just because we have stumbled across your books ;-) and learn how to operate a musket (albeit only theoretically) plus enlarge my vocabulary with all these scabres, carbines and other curb chains&We have been humbugged, gentlemen! We would like to thank you for many hours of great pleasure and fun and the vast amounts of knowledge and British humour packed into all volumes. I would specially like to thank you for the tender loving care you take with all the details like the cat carrying her kittens into a safe space/the gardener worrying about his peas in the middle of the horror of the Waterloo battle. These details among other things make it so much more worthwhile to read the books instead of just watching the DVD series (however for us foreigners it is a good help to listen to God save Ireland pronounced by Harper, or to some examples of other dialect in the film to be able to better hear the written words afterwards and appreciate even more) In your website, you leave space for suggesting interesting books and I would not be a proper Pole without trying to make you into skimming through the trilogy written in 19th (sic!) century by Henryk Sienkiewicz (see the Wikipedia quote below*) not only for descriptions of sieges, battles and cruelty of war. It has got enough plot and witty dialogues to make me swallow it within days when I was 12 (to be honest at that time I left out many of the bits describing the outstanding beauty of the Polish landscape to my defence, before getting his Nobel prize for literature, the author published his books in newspapers so I guess he was paid by the sentence ;-) Still its a fine read and I can only hope not all of the jests were lost in translation. Lots of thanks for mentioning the Polish cavalry taking part in the Waterloo battle even it was only for the picturesque white and red banners ;-) I was surprised by the war atrocities the French (and the oh so catholic Poles with them) committed towards civilians in Spain that you described, somehow I thought at that time wars were only fought at the battleground unlike in the conflicts yet to come. Well,in Poland we always had very romantic associations with Napoleon (and I not only mean Mrs.Walewska). Some of my ancestors with Napoleon till the end of the world, hoping that he would give us our country back – not the last time we were disappointed by our allies. I found a flag of a Polish unit that was on Elba at the “Dream and Trauma” Napoleon exhibition in Bonn this January (I think after Bonn it went to Paris but I do not know it is still on)And the golden “cuckoo” is really quite small! I’ve read all Sharpe books and watched all the films in less than 2 months (and that being a full time working mum of two young children),I saved the two novels as a special treat (and to avoid the risk of a divorce). Luckily Agincourt was lying around so I got Hooked, but this is only one book. (What astonished me is that in fact there was not much difference in the ways of attack / defend the town at a siege, just replace the arrow with the musket ball and make the guns a bit more powerful – but all the mines, the breaches, the willow baskets with earth remain the same?!) The Stonehenge did not last long, too. So please do write another Sharpe… In the meantime, we go to the UK for a weekend in April to have a look at the Leeds Castle, so since we never manage to pass across a Waterstone’s without actually buying something, this is only a matter of choosing between Starbuck and Grail series :-) Once again lots of thanks for all the pleasure! · *(With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem, 1884), which took place during the 17th century Cossack revolt known as the Khmelnytsky Uprising; made into a movie with the same title; · The Deluge, (Potop, 1886), describing the Swedish invasion of Poland known as The Deluge; made into a movie with the same title; · Fire in the Steppe also called Pan Michael (Pan WoBodyjowski, 1888), which took place during wars with the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century; made into a film titled Colonel Wolodyjowski.

Zuzanna Pakulla