Andrew Roberts - Napoleon the Great (2nd Hand Paperback)
Synopsis
Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just twenty years, from October 1795 when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'etat he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the Revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace, he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful 'Empire style' in the arts. The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where half a million Frenchmen died and his Empire began to unravel.
It has become all too common for Napoleon Bonaparte's biographers to approach him as a figure to be reviled, bent on world domination, practically a proto-Hitler. Here, after years of study extending even to visits paid to St Helena and 53 of Napoleon's 56 battlefields, Andrew Roberts has created a true portrait of the mind, the life, and the military and above all political genius of a fundamentally constructive ruler.
More than any other modern biographer, Andrew Roberts conveys Napoleon's tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality, even to his enemies. He has walked 53 of Napoleon's 60 battlefields, and has absorbed the gigantic new French edition of Napoleon's letters, which allows a complete re-evaluation of this exceptional man. He overturns many received opinions, including the myth of a great romance with Josephine: she took a lover immediately after their marriage, and, as Roberts shows, he had three times as many mistresses as he acknowledged.
This is the Napoleon, Roberts reminds us, whose peacetime activity produced countless indispensable civic innovations - and whose Napoleonic Code provided the blueprint for civil law systems still in use around the world today.
It is one of the greatest lives in world history, which here has found its ideal biographer. The sheer enjoyment which this book will give anyone who loves history is enormous.
Details
- Format : Very Thick 2nd Hand Paperback
- Condition : Very Good
- Category : Non-Fiction - History & Futurology
- Published : 2014 (This Edition 2015 - Penguin)
- ISBN : 9780141032016
- SKU : B002658
- PPC : SP700gm
- RRP : £14.99
- Quantity Available : 1 only.
External Reviews
'A Napoleonic triumph of a book, irresistibly galloping with the momentum of a cavalry charge.' - Simon Sebag Montefiore.
'Simply dynamite.' - Bernard Cornwell.
'Masterly . . . a huge, rich, deep, witty, humane and unapologetically admiring biography . . . gloriously enjoyable.' - Dan Jones, Daily Telegraph.
The Author
Andrew Roberts is a biographer and historian of international renown whose books include Salisbury: Victorian Titan (winner of the Wolfson Prize for History), Masters and Commanders (winner of the Emery Reves Award) and The Storm of War (winner of the British Army Book Prize). His most recent book was Napoleon the Great (2014), which won the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon and the Los Angeles Times Biography Prize. Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and a Trustee of the International Churchill Society. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Dept of War Studies at King's College, London, and the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Internal Reviews
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