Napoleon A Life

“A thrilling tale of military and political genius . . . Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer.” —The Washington Post
 
Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and an astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all time.

Andrew Roberts’s New York Times–bestselling Napoleon is the first single-volume, cradle-to-grave biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand surviving letters, which radically transform our understanding of this extraordinary man. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, inspired leader, passionate romantic, and visionary builder of the first modern state who cracked jokes in even the direst situations. Roberts, an award-winning historian, visited fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites and St. Helena and made crucial discoveries in archives around the world. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, and beautifully written by one of our foremost historians.

Andrew Roberts is the bestselling, award-winning author of The Storm of War, Masters and Commanders, Napoleon & Wellington, and Waterloo, among other books. A fellow of the Napoleonic Institute, his books have won the Wolfson History Prize and the British Army Military Book Award. Napoleon won the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoleon—the first time the prize was ever given for a work by a foreign historian.