Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte is remembered first for his battlefields: Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo. Andrew Roberts argues that this reputation undersells him. Soldier and ruler at once, Napoleon belongs with Washington and with Julius Caesar, the figure he admired most, among history's great soldier-statesmen. He was also a shrewd political operator and a commander who knew how to win the loyalty of his men.

This single-volume life draws on a resource earlier biographers did not have: the recently published collection of some thirty-three thousand of Napoleon's own letters. Roberts uses them to rework the familiar picture of the man. The Napoleon who emerges is decisive and able to juggle many tasks at once, and he is also more forgiving than his legend suggests, willing to pardon his enemies and even his unfaithful wife Josephine.

Roberts also looks at how Napoleon shaped his own legacy. Like Churchill, he grasped that whoever tells the story controls its memory, and the memoirs he dictated in exile on St. Helena became the bestselling book of the nineteenth century.

The research behind the book was physical as well as archival. Roberts visited fifty-three of Napoleon's sixty battle sites, turned up important documents in archives, and made the long sea journey to St. Helena. The result is a portrait that treats Napoleon's politics with as much care as his campaigns. Roberts is also the author of Churchill and The Last King of America.