Napoleon
by Andrew Roberts | 
Masters and Commanders
by Andrew Roberts | 
Versailles
by Tony Spawforth | 
To the Scaffold
by Carolly Erickson | 
Martyrs and Murderers
by Stuart Carroll | 
Becoming Charlemagne
by Jeff Sypeck | 
Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire
by Flora Fraser | 
The Wright Brothers
by David McCullough | 
The Professor and the Madman
by Simon Winchester | 
The Warmth of Other Suns
by Isabel Wilkerson | 
Crazy Horse and Custer
by Stephen E. Ambrose | 
The Spy and the Traitor
by Ben Macintyre | 
The Life of Elizabeth I
by Alison Weir | 
Paul Revere's Ride
by David Hackett Fischer | 
Empire of the Summer Moon
by S. C. Gwynne | 
The Woman Who Smashed Codes
by Jason Fagone | 
Barracoon
by Zora Neale Hurston | 
The Meaning of Everything
by Simon Winchester | 
The Last Stand
by Nathaniel Philbrick | 
A Man Called Intrepid
by William Stevenson |
On the morning of the battle of Waterloo, the Emperor Napoleon declared that the Duke of Wellington was a bad general, the British were bad soldiers and that France could not fail to have an easy victory. Forever afterwards historians have accused him of gross overconfidence, and massively underestimating the calibre of the British commander opposed to him. Andrew Roberts presents this revisionist view of the relationship between the two greatest captains of their age. Napoleon, who was born in the same year as Wellington - 1769 - fought Wellington by proxy years earlier in the Peninsular War, praising his ruthlessness in private whilst publicly deriding him as a mere sepoy general. In contrast, Wellington publicly lauded Napoleon, saying that his presence on a battlefield was worth forty thousand men, but privately wrote long memoranda lambasting Napoleon's campaigning techniques. Although Wellington saved Napoleon from execution after Waterloo, Napoleon left money in his will to the man who had tried to assassinate Wellington.