"Book review: ‘Napoleon: A Life,’ by Andrew Roberts" Topic
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Tango01 | 09 Dec 2014 12:41 p.m. PST |
"Ah, if it were only to be done over again!" sighed Napoleon Bonaparte about the Battle of Waterloo as he sailed into exile and imprisonment. He would have six years on the island of St. Helena to ponder his battles, his imperial reign in France and his improbable rise from Corsican obscurity. Napoleon was a whirling dynamo whose ceaseless energy led Talleyrand, that wily old cynic, to laconically lament, "What a pity the man wasn't lazy." And the breathtaking arc of his career has attracted countless chroniclers since his death in 1821, aged just 51. He may be the most written-about human being in history. But perhaps none has taken to the task with greater zeal than Andrew Roberts, the much-garlanded British historian, whose admiration for his subject infuses and enlivens this brilliant new biography. And no charge of laziness would stick to Roberts, who devoted more time to research than Napoleon spent on Elba and St. Helena combined. In the course of that study, Roberts immersed himself in his subject's 33,000 letters, visited 53 of the 60 Napoleonic battlefields and even sailed to that lonely South Atlantic rock where he ended his days. Roberts embarks upon this enterprise by observing that much of the source material for previous biographies is suspect. The supposed memoirs and reminiscences of many in Napoleon's entourage of rackety courtiers were often ghostwritten in an attempt to impugn his memory. And according to Roberts, these accounts have served as ammunition for those who would portray Napoleon as a sort of "proto-Hitler" whose rule laid the moral and intellectual groundwork for more terrible tyrannies to come…" Full review here link Amicalement Armand |
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