After being repeatedly delayed over the last year, Norman Friedman's latest opus is here. Interestingly enough, it's set up like a submarine sandwich. Only the middle 160 pages actually focus entirely on the design and development of British submarines, with the first 50 providing background information on the immediate post-war situation, Cold War strategy, the perception of the Soviet threat, and an introduction to sonar and underwater sound. There are four lengthy appendixes, focusing on sonar, fire control and command systems, submarine weapons, and midget submarines. Finally, we get 72(!) pages of footnotes, specifications tables, and a list of submarines and their fates.If you've read the author's prior books on British warships, or his "Illustrated Design Histories," you'll know what to expect. Despite being substantially shorter than "British Submarines in Two World Wars," there's still a LOT of detail crammed in here, much of which seems to be recently declassified. As an American, I found it rather fascinating to see how British submarine design and policy differed from our own, and how dependant the first British nuclear submarines were on American assistance. We get a strong feeling for just how stressful and frustrating maintaining a balanced submarine fleet for the Royal Navy has been, ranging from limited budgets to conflicting requirements, lack of trained personnel, quality control issues, sonar capabilities outpacing the ability to track multiple targets, and so on. Some bits come across as almost comical, such as the nearly 20-year long quest to design a follow-up to the "Trafalgar" class, and the incomprehensible decision to effectively disband the Royal Corp of Naval Engineers and let inexperienced private industries design the "Astute."The big surprise here, however, is the plans. As usual with Seaforth, they're too small to read without a good magnifying glass, but, as far as I can tell, this is the first time actual shipyard plans of a nuclear submarine have appeared in print. Rather than depicting everything aft of the sail conjecturally or as a blank space, we get detailed views showing every piece of machinery onboard, including multiple plan and sectional views, of the Valiant-, Resolution-, and Swiftsure-classes. Similarly detailed plans of the HTP test submarine "Explorer" are also included; a technical dead end, but still cool to see. There are also a few diagrams by John Lambert, including a five-sheet set of plans of the midget "X51."While Dr. Friedman remains a bit of an acquired taste, I feel like the writing here is a bit more tightly focused than some of his more rambling works. It helps that the British have only built about a dozen unique submarine types since World War Two, making the timeline easier to follow than its predecessor. Still, it sometimes makes for dry reading, with the narrative occasionally boiling down to "first they did this, then they did that, but that didn't work, so they went back and increased the beam six inches, but that caused problems, so they had to..." Putting that aside, this is a fascinating book for serious submarine buffs, and the wealth of recently declassified material makes up for the somewhat clunky writing.