From the Author of the Internationally Bestselling Red Herrings & White Elephants, Pop Goes the Weasel, What Caesar did for My Salad, Shaggy Dogs, They Laughed at Galileo:

Many times, during every single day, all of us will use what is known as an Idiom. Idioms are words and phrases, which those of us with a native English tongue take for granted as we have grown up to recognise their meaning. That is despite the words being used having absolutely nothing at all to do with the context of a conversation we are having. 

Those little phrases appear in conversation all over the English speaking world, every minute of the day, and we take them for granted. And many of them have evolved from a particular event, or repeated events, or even perhaps a significant figure from history. 

There are thousands of them that have been covered in my books Red Herrings and White Elephants, Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep or It's a Wonderful World. In this volume, however, we are going to concentrate only on those with a nautical or military history.
I know you have heard many of them before and probably even use them regularly. Now, you are going to love finding out where they came from in the first place and how they became part of the rich English language.