`Napoleon is an out-and-out masterpiece and a joy to read'
Sir Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad A landmark new biography that presents the man behind the many myths.
Based on primary sources in many European languages, and beautifully illustrated with portraits done only from life, this.
He did not start this war but it dominated his life and continued, with one brief interruption, until his final defeat in 1815.
In the 1790s, a young Napoleon entered a world at war, a bitter struggle for supremacy and survival with leaders motivated by a quest for power and by self-interest.
Adam Zamoyski strips away the lacquer of prejudice and places Napoleon the man within the context of his times.
What made his ambition exceptional was the scope it was accorded by circumstance.
His motives were mostly praiseworthy and his ambition no greater than that of contemporaries such as Alexander I of Russia, Wellington, Nelson and many more.
He could be selfish and violent but there is no evidence of him wishing to inflict suffering gratuitously.
But nor was Napoleon an evil monster.
A brilliant tactician, he was no strategist.
He exhibited some extraordinary qualities during some phases of his life but it is hard to credit genius to a general who presided over the worst (and self-inflicted) disaster in military history and who single-handedly destroyed the great enterprise he and others had toiled so hard to construct.
He was a man and, as Adam Zamoyski presents him in this landmark biography, a rather ordinary one at that.
Was he a god-like genius, Romantic avatar, megalomaniac monster, compulsive warmonger or just a nasty little dictator? While he displayed elements of these traits at certain times, Napoleon was none of these things.
Napoleon inspires passionately held and often conflicting visions.
The first writer in English to go back to the original European sources, Adam Zamoyski's portrait of Napoleon is historical biography at its finest. `Napoleon is an out-and-out masterpiece and a joy to read'
Sir Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad A landmark new biography that presents the man behind the many myths
