About Me

‘I started writing in my teens. After completing one novel and part-completing a second I came to realise they would never be published – so I consigned reams of paper to the attic and got on with real life.

It was a sense of fair play that started me again. I’d been researching the British Cavalry of the Georgian and Regency periods (don’t ask – it’s a long story) and found that not one historian had a good word to say about them.

I read more and more, coming up against the same old ‘galloping at everything’ attitude to horsemen – no -one seemed to have put the all the circumstances of the so-called ‘cavalry disasters’ under the microscope.

Someone needed to write about how the British cavalry who fought against Napoleon really lived – and died. How they survived, in times of peace and war. How they saw what their commanders viewed as ‘disasters’. And how they celebrated their triumphs.

So I started to write the story of these men, and I’m still writing it.’

Jonathan Hopkins lives and works in the Vale of Glamorgan in South Wales. A keen rider, having done a variety of jobs he spent the last ten years as a professional saddle fitter and is Chairman of a BHS afilliated Riding Club.

In November 2010 he gave a lecture to the Napoleonic Association Annual Conference entitled ‘Researching and Writing a Historical Novel.’