My postman has been complaining recently. In between wheezes and groaning he complains about the weight of the parcels and packages that he drops through my letterbox. I smile nicely, thank him politely and eagerly rip open the brown packaging and delve inside. My postman is right to a degree, this is a heavy book in terms of weight that is, but in style and design it is truly excellent.

The editor has assembled some of the best names in naval research to write profiles of some of the best known as well as least well-known capital ships from the pre-dreadnought era to the end of the battleship era. Bruce Taylor’s only stipulation on the qualifying entry is that it each ship has a gun calibre of eight inches or above. Obviously, this will include some warships that would not automatically include battleships and battlecruisers, but we can overlook this due to the quality of the work and the histories of the ships themselves. The level of research is out-standing and the readability of the text is superb. Such care and attention in the selection of photographs and illustrations also shows on every single page of this book. Twenty-one ships have been selected to be profiled ranging from the Chinese Chen Yuen of 1882 and Norway’s Eidsvoid of 1900 to such leviathans as HMS Hood, the Japanese Nagato, Italy and Germany’s ill-fated Scharnhorst and Littorio as well as one of the few surviving examples of the battleship the US Navy’s magnificent USS Missouri.

With nearly 450 pages this book is highly recommended for any naval enthusiasts’ bookshelf and I feel that I will be delving into its pages long into the future to find another superb nugget of information about this amazing period of naval history.