Pollard insists in the preface that this isn't a biography, and indeed it isn't if one by that understands a portrait of a personality. What it is is a narrative of Talbot's military career in France, accompanied with thematic chapters looking at things like chivalry and the "business" side of war, such as the profits to be made from pillage and ransom.

Talbot was the chief English field commander during the final decades of the Hundred Years' War, when the English forces tried and eventually failed to hold on to their possessions in France. Fittingly, his death in battle at Castillon marked the effective end of the English war effort.

Despite never being able to turn the tide of the war, Talbot garnered great fame and respect as a dashing commander and chivalrous knight; the French, with a compartmentalization alien to modern minds, equally respected his gallantry and hated his cruelty. Commentators in later ages have tended to be less impressed; chivalry, to modern eyes, is little excuse for a general who loses a war, and to boot, in his two great battles is captured in one (Patay 1429) and defeated and killed in the other. Pollard suggests this is unfair even by modern standards - the war was principally lost because of the defection of England's Burgundian allies and the reconstruction of the French monarchy by Charles VII, and pitched battle, for all the fame of Agincourt, was of secondary importance in the Hundred Years' War. In his estimation, Talbot was a good, but not outstanding, commander, whose penchant for precipitate attack, however misplaced at Castillon, was usually employed with calculation and often with success in smaller actions. With someone else at the helm the English cause may have collapsed far sooner.

The book is highly readable and the chapters are free-standing - a reader less interested in administrative or theoretical matters might easily skip the thematic chapters and read just the narrative ones without missing anything necessary to follow the latter.

I will start out by saying that I had such high hopes for this book. John Talbot is one of the most intriguing characters of the Hundred Years War (in my humble opinion) and very little in the way of biography formatted books about Talbot are out there. When I came across this one I was very excited and believed I'd found something that would reveal a lot more about him and some of exploits. I was let down.
This book, like so many others to recently hit the market with the Hundred Years War as the subject, would be a great book to reference if you were WRITING a book about the war. It is very tedious, dry, and dare I say, BORING, book to read. If you just scan a page in a book and notice a huge amount of dates sandwich between the words, you can just about bet that this page will be no fun. I understand that part of history study is about specific dates, but the greater part of that study is about WHAT HAPPENED on those dates. Many of you will understand what I'm talking about. Dates, names, and places are repeated over, and over, and over again. The book is not even in chronological order! So you cover the same dates, places, and names over, and over, and over.
The worst thing about this book is that is lends no new insight into Talbot's life that I already had not gleaned from [The Crecy War]. I am saddened to say that this book is a huge dissapointment. ( )