The subtitle is plenty descriptive, though it should be added it deals only with western Europe, especially France and Prussia, while there's hardly anything on Spain. It's less forbiddingly academic than I'd been led to expect, but Nosworthy presumes significant prior knowledge of the period - just as an example, he once refers to "Luxembourg's time", taking for granted the reader knows when that was. He also expects the reader to have at least a basic familiarity with Napoleonic tactics, which he frequently uses as a point of comparison.

Organizationally, the book suffers a bit from significant repetition - one wonders if some of the chapters were originally written independently and only later combined into a larger whole. Otherwise it's written well enough, and while there's of necessity a lot of military jargon, it's explained as it's introduced.

The book deals with both tactical doctrine and practice, and the sometimes significant gap between them - official regulation often lagged battlefield practice by decades, and sometimes prescribed impractical or wholly theoretical methods.