His father was operating as a guerrilla fighter and his mother was wandering the hills as a refugee during the final months of her pregnancy. The island of Corsica was rife with revolution when Napoleon was born upon it. Under such circumstances, what I appreciate has a tendency to be drawn from my own extrapolation. And Wellington's artillery goes over there.

I'm certain nine out of ten of them would toss a limp wave in my direction, assuming with no evidence whatsoever that I'm talking about some romantic urge to hear more about Josephine. These are largely enthusiasts who can easily be imagined commandeering a mudroom to set up Waterloo-to-scale on an old table tennis platform. I'm going to go even further to say that much of the work on Napoleon appears to have been produced by avid, whiskered boys who care more about the wars and the weapons and the testosterone required to mount a campaign to rule the world than they do the finer points of this history. And since Englishmen write most of them? This sets the book apart. It is rare to find such an even-handed study of Bonaparte coming from an Englishman. In the afterward (penned by Steven Englund), the bulk of the praise goes to Markham's objectivity. This is especially irksome when it comes to the battlefield, where he's fleet enough to hold interest but still manages to sail strategic troop movement and command philosophy like Frisbees over the head. He does fall prey to that habit of experts in a given field, assuming far too often that his reader is aware of the fundamentals. It is comprehensive, well-researched and relatively accessible. Markham's biography stands as one of the more popular works in the Napoleonic oeuvre.

Napoleon by felix markham