Title: Napoleon: A Life

Author: Andrew Roberts

Publisher: Viking

Publication Date: 11/04/2014

ASIN: 0670025321

Book Description:

The biography of the great soldier-statesman Napoleon

His battles (Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo…) are among the greatest in history, but Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier statesmen of all times.

Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first biography to take advantage of the publication of Napoleon’s 33 thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Winston Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the 19th century.

An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to 53 of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians