Napoleon

The best of this year’s gardening books

4 November 2023 9:00 am

Authors reviewed include Jinny Blom on design, Jenny Joseph on scented plants, Maury C. Flannery on herbaria and Francis Pryor on his Fenland haven

Graham Robb deserves to be a French national treasure

12 March 2022 9:00 am

Philip Hensher is enthralled by Graham Robb’s evocative new history of France

New tactics are needed for the wars of the future

30 October 2021 9:00 am

The strategic bankruptcy of the West has twice so far this century demanded that our brave soldiers risk their bodies…

Don’t ask a historian what history is

16 October 2021 9:00 am

E.H. Carr’s 1961 book What is History? has cast a long shadow over the discipline. I recall being assigned to…

Fiction’s most famous Rifleman returns — and it’s miraculous he’s still alive

9 October 2021 9:00 am

It has been 15 years since the last Richard Sharpe novel, and it’s a pleasure to report that fiction’s most…

How Macron was outfoxed by a dead Napoleonic general

14 July 2021 9:16 pm

Skeletons don’t always lurk in cupboards, some of them hide under dance floors waiting for a particularly rousing party to…

How Napoleon changed the world

5 May 2021 4:37 pm

Two hundred years ago today, Napoleon Bonaparte closed his eyes for the final time. A man born to relative obscurity…

Kubrick's Napoleon – the greatest movie never made

1 May 2021 9:00 am

Theo Zenou on Kubrick’s fascination with the fallen Emperor

Macron's Napoleon complex

4 April 2021 4:15 pm

May 5th this year will be the two hundredth anniversary of Napoleon’s death on Saint Helena, the tiny island in…

Toussaint Louverture: the true hero of Haiti

29 August 2020 9:00 am

Toussaint Louverture’s ‘crazy dream’ for Haiti has still to be realised, says Amy Wilentz

Grand Duke Francesco I de Medici may have been poisoned with arsenic by his brother Ferdinando. Portrait by Agnolo Bronzino

The age of chivalry was an age of devilry

5 January 2019 9:00 am

Agatha Christie’s spirit must be loving this poisonous new historical entertainment. Eleanor Herman has already enjoyed the success of Sex…

Books of the year – part one

10 November 2018 9:00 am

Andrew Motion Short stories seem to fare better in the US than the UK, and among this year’s rich crop,…

Giving the famous V-sign at the opening of RAAF headquarters, Croydon, 1948 [Getty]

Andrew Roberts’s generous new biography of the man who saved us in our darkest hour, Churchill reviewed

6 October 2018 9:00 am

Churchill must be the most written-about figure in public life since Napoleon Bonaparte (a subject, incidentally, to which Andrew Roberts…

'The Charge of the 10th Hussars at Benevente (Corunna Campaign), 1809', c1915 (1928)

On the run from Corunna: Now We Shall be Entirely Free, by Andrew Miller, reviewed

1 September 2018 9:00 am

There is only one Andrew Miller. In the 20 years since his debut novel Ingenious Pain won both the James…

‘The Battle of the Pyramids’, 1798–9, by François-Louis-Joseph Watteau

The best and most extensive exhibition on Napoleon in three decades

16 June 2018 9:00 am

The Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides in Paris has a new exhibition that I believe to be the best…

The city’s beauty has often been described as ‘melancholic’, ‘sinister’ or ‘dreamlike’

‘The finest architectural delusion in the world’

14 May 2016 9:00 am

It took the madness of genius to build such a wonderful impossibility. Patrick Marnham reviews a delightful new literary guide to Venice

The ruthless Romanovs’ horrible history

30 January 2016 9:00 am

It’s hard to tell at times who came off worst in Romanov Russia — the tsar or his subjects, says Adam Zamoyski

The Emperor Maximilian I by Bernhard Strigel

The Holy Roman Empire has been much maligned

23 January 2016 9:00 am

The Holy Roman Empire has been much maligned over the centuries. In fact it worked remarkably well, says Jonathan Steinberg

Monumental change: the overthrow of the statue of Napoleon I, which was on top of the Vendôme Column. The painter Gustave Courbet is ninth from the right

A short history of statue-toppling

9 January 2016 9:00 am

Sculptural topplings provide an index of changing times, says Martin Gayford

The edible woman: Lily James as Natasha Rostova in ‘War and Peace’

War & Peace is actually just an upmarket Downton Abbey

9 January 2016 9:00 am

Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale…

Puccini’s villain as swashbuckling hero

29 October 2015 9:00 am

You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…

France’s favourite bedtime story: a sanitised version of the French Revolution

18 July 2015 9:00 am

The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during…

The new Imperial Royal Austrian Light Infantry c.1820

The honour of the Habsburgs was all that mattered to the imperial Austrian army

20 June 2015 9:00 am

John Keegan, perhaps the greatest British military historian of recent years, felt that the most important book (because of its…

How the French won Waterloo (or think they did)

13 June 2015 9:00 am

The French would still prefer to think of Napoleon’s last defeat as a moral victory