Napoleon: A Life

The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the acclaimed author of The Storm of War—winner of the LA Times Book prize, finalist for the Plutarch prize, winner of the Fondation Napoleon prize and a New York Times bestseller “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 astute leader  of men. Like George 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 one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent  publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three 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 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 nineteenth century. An award-winning  historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three 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.