For the most part, A Splendid Little War can be enjoyed or endured on the same terms as the previous seven books in Derek Robinson's RFC/RAF series. I wrote in my review of the previous book, Hornet's Sting, that all the books possess positives in strong writing, particularly regarding the combat, the history and (in moderation) the sharp dialogue. They also possess negatives in that there is often the lack of a grounded plot, tending instead towards rambles through a wide theatre of war, and there is a snarky cynicism which easily tilts into exhausting nihilism.

Overall quality in a Robinson book is more or less assured; what is at stake is the mixture when you open a new title. If it's off-balance, it can feel like you're re-reading a book from earlier in the series. If it's done right, it's much easier to be taken along. You can breathe, and it's the difference between fresh air and cabin air. A Splendid Little War does the mixture fairly well, and there were no moments – as there had been in previous books – where it felt sluggish and difficult to endure. Robinson is a writer to admire.

Where A Splendid Little War stands out from the other books is its setting: the British intervention in the Russian Civil War of 1919. Robinson has tackled untypical topics before (Hullo Russia, Goodbye England covered the M.A.D. nuclear-bomber strategy of the 1960s), but A Splendid Little War felt particularly fresh. Partly this was because the other six books in the series cover the two World Wars (three apiece), but mostly it's because the 1919 'Intervention' doesn't loom large in Western history, and so reading the book feels like a real education. Robinson does very well to build up the reader's knowledge of the campaign over the course of 300 pages, while also staying honest as a storyteller with regard to the characters and so on. It's a very creditable piece of historical fiction.

It can be rather uncanny for a British reader to read of the 1919 Intervention; even that year, '1919', seems strange when you look at it on the pages of war. A Splendid Little War takes place in a theatre involving Kharkov, Kursk and Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad), and the reader's mind quite naturally goes to a different later conflict, one without British combatants. Or, seeking the familiar, the reader clutches at knowledge of a much earlier British escapade in the Crimea. Robinson's success is in steering us into the reality of the 1919 war. It stops being a novelty and becomes a page of history in its own right.

The Intervention was brutal, shambolic and by no means small; Robinson tells us in his Foreword that Britain invested the equivalent of a billion pounds in modern money in the conflict, and the main story tells us that many hundreds of British lives were lost (to say nothing of the Russians). Robinson's signature suddenness and ruthlessness in killing off main characters takes on even more potency here; it's much more blackly comic to see a pilot lost in a minor skirmish in an unknown Russian war than it is in the two World Wars, where we can at least hold on to scraps of grand meaning and worth. But, as one White Russian says on page 79, "Russia is not a tennis court," and the 'splendid little war' that Britain hoped to find turned out to be an ugly, chaotic mess – and one with great consequences. Robinson raises the point in the final chapter, and in his Author's Note at the end, that Western violation of Russian borders in 1919 was a major factor in the Russian cultural mindset well into the Cold War. In light of the shambles that Robinson has just unfolded for the reader over the previous 300 pages, it's a quietly sobering – and enduringly relevant – criticism of futile military adventures, particularly ones entered into with ignorance. Regardless of their mixture, Robinson's books have always had this dose-of-smelling-salts intelligence, and reading him has never been futile. ( )

Disappointing. Packed it in after first thirty pages. ( )