The critic who took Rathbone to task, for appearing to claim a superiority of approach to the professional historian, in dealing with such contentious historical material, was raising a question which Rathbone's career, and "The Mutiny", was dedicated to answering. For a man of wide intellectual interests Rathbone produced relatively little outside his long list of novels. Much travelled, and loving foreign places, he always aspired to produce volumes of travel writing, but nothing in this direction ever came to fruition commercially. His one non-fictional publication was "Wellington's War" (1984), product of a fascination with Wellington which dated back to schooldays. Following within fifteen years of Elizabeth Longford's two-volume biography, which re-established Wellington as a subject for serious study, Rathbone's book is a radical and original departure from the normal run of biographical accounts. Based on detailed research into both Wellington's collected correspondence and the battlefields of the Peninsular War, it counterpoints extracts from the letters with Rathbone's own elucidations and comments. As well as uniquely conveying the immediacy of events through Wellington's thought-processes and human voice, "Wellington's War" does more than any other book on the subject to illustrate the dimension and brilliance of Wellington's genius. The Duke himself has a habit of cropping up in various of Rathbone's fictions, notably in "Joseph" and "A Very English Agent" and, more hauntingly, in "Blame Hitler", the novel in which Rathbone writes about his own father. Rathbone described his own interest in Wellington as "probably Oedipal", and the Duke as "the ultimate father-figure". "Wellington's War" remains unique not only in Rathbone's own work but also in the growing contemporary literature on Wellington.