Marshal Michael Carver in his book Dilemmas of the Desert War; Carver calls Barnett "naïve" and notes numerous flaws in his work. He also published Britain and Her Army 1509–1970, which as a survey combines the political, the social and the military over the grand sweep of Britain's post-medieval history. In several of his works (The Desert Generals, The Swordbearers) Barnett portrayed the British armed forces as hidebound by tradition (e.g. cavalry regiments allegedly reluctant to adopt modern tank tactics) and by technology inferior to that of the Germans. This position was also attacked by Carver, who observed that during Operation Crusader and during the Battle of Gazala, British technology was a match for, or in some cases, better than that used by the German and Italian armies. Barnett made this point of the British armour in the desert, and of Jellicoe's Grand Fleet at Jutland in 1916. In his Bonaparte (1978), he took a more critical view of Napoleon Bonaparte than is customary, portraying him almost as a Mediterranean bandit keen to dish out crowns and honours to cronies and members of his blood family, and stressing how much many of his most famous successes owed much to bluff and luck (e.g. the fortuitous arrival of General Louis Desaix at the Battle of Marengo). The Pride and Fall Sequence Barnett's The Pride and Fall sequence comprises: (1) The Collapse of British Power; (2) The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (published as The Pride and the Fall: The Dream and Illusion of Britain as a Great Nation, in the USA); (3) The Lost Victory: British Dreams, British Realities, 1945-50; and (4) The Verdict of Peace: Britain Between Her Yesterday and the Future. In sum, the sequence describes the decline of British power during the twentieth century, a decline attributed by the author to a change in the values of Britain's governing élite from the late eighteenth century, and one which was encouraged by evangelical and non-conformist Christianity. Barnett claims that the statesmen of the eighteenth century were men "hard of mind and hard of will" who regarded "national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three". Furthermore, they regarded it as "natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity