As a writer, especially a fiction writer, I collect details and search for interesting, memorable ways to describe them. My quest to capture the essence of Napoleon requires recreating, first in my mind and then in my readers’ imaginations, a sense of his everyday life. For example, when he got out of bed, did his […]
The breadth of Napoleonic material amazes and at times overwhelms me. Of course, its volume results from the huge impact he had in so many physical, political and cultural areas of the world, but I am grateful to the multitude of scholars who have painstakingly recorded the details, both small and large. I’m not a
He is the epitome of France, yet he didn’t speak French until he was nine. The second son of minor, impoverished Corsican nobility, he attended military school on the French king’s sou. By age thirty, he had supplanted that monarch as France’s ruler. He faced battle fearlessly but could be petulant over a slight head
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