Napoleon

"It is the outstanding merit of Adam Zamoyski's fine new biography, Napoleon: A Life, that he insists on treating his subject as neither a superman nor a monster, but as a creature of his troubled age...Zamoyski gives us...a vivid sense of Napoleon as a protean chancer, outwardly self-confident as any man who ever lived, inwardly always wondering when his 'star' would finally set."

"Zamoyski...attempts to cut through the fantasy and retrospective exaggeration to tell the story of an extraordinary, but certainly not superhuman life.... Napoleon emerges from Mr. Zamoyski's book a willful, self-made opportunist...gifted, energetic, brave, lucky, but also a bit ridiculous."

"Magnificent...Napoleon was neither demon nor deity. He was a man, with great talents and great flaws, often intertwined...[Mr. Zamoyski] writes beautifully."

"Zamoyski tells the personal side of Napoleon's life...his hopes, his dreams, his self-doubts."

"Zamoyski's book is one of the finest biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte ever written."

"A lifetime's diligent research and profound thinking about Napoleon and his times has gone into this hugely readable, highly enjoyable and well-balanced biography. Zamoyski is at the top of his game as a biographer."

"A biography of Napoleon Bonaparte that avoids the well-established military details and gives us the story of a singular man...Illuminating."

"Engaging and highly readable.... An inclusive life of a historical dynamo."

"Adam Zamoyski's 700-plus-page but very readable Napoleon: A Life...shows how France's tired post-revolutionary leaders in 1796 recognized they were riding a tiger---but didn't expect him to eat them."

"A superb history of a complicated man and time."

A success in all respects, rivaling Andrew Roberts's Napoleon: A Life in astuteness and thoroughness.... The picture that emerges is of an extraordinarily gifted leader who increasingly sought short-term gain at the expense of long-term stability.... Exhaustively researched and engagingly written."

"Napoleon is an out and out masterpiece and a joy to read."

"Always elegant in style and original in analysis. Zamoyski, a master of the sources and of the culture and politics that created his subject, produces a fresh, nuanced, beautifully written, gripping, and outstanding biography of Napoleon that reveals him to be a triumph of luck and accident as much as the invincible genius of the legend."

"Adam Zamoyski has retold a story that we thought we knew and made it fresh: Stripping away two centuries of mythology, discarding the apocryphal stories and legends, he finally brings us the real Napoleon."

"Zamoyski sticks close to verifiable primary sources...What we get is more a historical Napoleon than the colossus of cultural memory, but a figure no less fascinating for that. Napoleon's life was a rollercoaster and Zamoyski takes us along for the ride."

"A masterful historian, Zamoyski fulfills his task eloquently. Napoleon is often called a military and political genius, but in reading Zamoyski, the question arises: how much of Napoleon's perceived greatness was owing...to timing and circumstance in the stormy political world of 18th-century revolutionary France?"