Against the dramatic backdrop of the French Revolution, historian Scurr tracks Robespierre's evolution from lawyer to revolutionary leader. This is a fascinating portrait of a man who identified with the Revolution to the point of madness, and in so doing changed the course of history.

First published in 1896, “The Voice of a Great” contains a selection of the speeches, correspondence, and proclamations of the French military and political leader Napoléon Bonaparte, edited by Ida Tarbell. The book is split into five parts: “The Campaign in Italy”, “The Egyptian Expedition”, “Napoleon, First Consul”, “Napoleon, Emperor of France”, and “The Fall of Napoleon”. “The Voice of a Great” offers a fantastic insight into the mind of one of the greatest commanders in history, whose wars and campaigns are still studied at military schools the world over. Highly recommended for those with an interest in the life of Napoleon and military history in general. Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857–1944) was an American journalist, writer, lecturer, and biographer. A pioneer in investigative journalism, her 1904 book “The History of the Standard Oil Company” famously contributed to the dissolution of the Standard Oil monopoly and the introduction of the Hepburn Act of 1906. As well as articles and exposés, she also wrote a number of biographies on historical figures, believing that their ideals and motivations could be studied in order to positively change society. Other notable works by this author include: “Madame Roland: A Biographical Study.” (1896), “The Life of Abraham Lincoln” (1900), and “Father Abraham New York” (1909). Read & Co. History is proudly republishing this classic work now in a new edition complete with an introductory chapter by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

'A truly remarkable writer, one of the most gifted non-fiction authors alive' Simon Schama, Financial Times SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD This is the autobiography that John Aubrey never wrote. You may not know his name. Aubrey was a modest man, a gentleman-scholar who cared far more for the preservation of history than for his own legacy. But he was a passionate collector, an early archaeologist and the inventor of modern biography. With all the wit, charm and originality that characterises her subject, Ruth Scurr has seamlessly stitched together John Aubrey's own words to tell his life story and a captivating history of seventeenth-century England unlike any other. 'A game-changer in the world of biography' Mary Beard 'Ingenious' Hilary Mantel 'Irresistible' Philip Pullman

A sweeping historical debut about the Creole socialite who transformed herself into an empress Readers are fascinated with the wives of famous men. In Becoming Josephine, debut novelist Heather Webb follows Rose Tascher as she sails from her Martinique plantation to Paris, eager to enjoy an elegant life at the royal court. Once there, however, Rose’s aristocratic soldier-husband dashes her dreams by abandoning her amid the tumult of the French Revolution. After narrowly escaping death, Rose reinvents herself as Josephine, a beautiful socialite wooed by an awkward suitor—Napoleon Bonaparte. “A debut as bewitching as its protagonist.” —Erika Robuck, author of Hemingway’s Girl and Call Me Zelda “Vivid and passionate.” —Susan Spann, author of The Shinobi Mysteries From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a futuristic novel set in London in 1984. Chesterton envisions neither great technological leaps nor totalitarian suppression. Instead, England is ruled by a series of randomly selected Kings, because people have become entirely indifferent. The joker Auberon Quin is crowned and he instates elaborate costumes for every sector of London. All the city's provosts are bored with the idea except for the earnest young Adam Wayne - the Napoleon of Notting Hill.

This “rich . . . highly enjoyable portrait of an extraordinary moment in French history” introduces us to 7 dazzling aristocrats who rose and fell during the French Revolution (Guardian). Benedetta Craveri reveals the history of the Libertine generation “whose youth coincided with the French monarchy’s final moment of grace—a moment when . . . a style of life based on privilege and the spirit of caste might acknowledge the widespread demand for change, and . . . reconcile itself with Enlightenment ideals of justice, tolerance, and citizenship.” Here we meet 7 characters who Craveri singles out not only for their “romantic character” but also for “the keenness with which they experienced this crisis . . . of the ancien régime, of which they themselves were the emblem.” • Duc de Lauzun • Vicomte de Ségur • Duc de Brissac • Comte de Narbonne • Chevalier de Boufflers • Comte de Ségur • Comte de Vaudreuil These men were at once “irreducible individualists” and true “sons of the Enlightenment”—all of them ambitious to play their part in bringing around the great changes that were in the air. But when the French Revolution came, they found themselves condemned to poverty, exile, and in some cases execution. Telling the parallel lives of these dazzling but little-remembered historical figures, Craveri brings the past to life, powerfully dramatizing a turbulent time that was at once the last act of a now-vanished world and the first act of our own.

Marking the 200th anniversary of his death, Napoleon is an unprecedented portrait of the emperor told through his engagement with the natural world. “How should one envisage this subject? With a great pomp of words, or with simplicity?” —Charlotte Brontë, “The Death of Napoleon” The most celebrated general in history, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821) has for centuries attracted eminent male writers. Since Thomas Carlyle first christened him “our last Great Man,” regiments of biographers have marched across the same territory, weighing campaigns and conflicts, military tactics and power politics. Yet in all this time, no definitive portrait of Napoleon has endured, and a mere handful of women have written his biography—a fact that surely would have pleased him. With Napoleon, Ruth Scurr, one of our most eloquent and original historians, emphatically rejects the shibboleth of the “Great Man” theory of history, instead following the dramatic trajectory of Napoleon’s life through gardens, parks, and forests. As Scurr reveals, gardening was the first and last love of Napoleon, offering him a retreat from the manifold frustrations of war and politics. Gardens were, at the same time, a mirror image to the battlefields on which he fought, discrete settings in which terrain and weather were as important as they were in combat, but for creative rather than destructive purposes. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary and historical scholarship, and taking us from his early days at the military school in Brienne-le-Château through his canny seizure of power and eventual exile, Napoleon frames the general’s story through the green spaces he cultivated. Amid Corsican olive groves, ornate menageries in Paris, and lone garden plots on the island of Saint Helena, Scurr introduces a diverse cast of scientists, architects, family members, and gardeners, all of whom stood in the shadows of Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall. Building a cumulative panorama, she offers indelible portraits of Augustin Bon Joseph de Robespierre, the younger brother of Maximilien Robespierre, who used his position to advance Napoleon’s career; Marianne Peusol, the fourteen-year-old girl manipulated into a Christmas-Eve assassination attempt on Napoleon that resulted in her death; and Emmanuel, comte de Las Cases, the atlas maker to whom Napoleon dictated his memoirs. As Scurr contends, Napoleon’s dealings with these people offer unusual and unguarded opportunities to see how he grafted a new empire onto the remnants of the ancien régime and the French Revolution. Epic in scale and novelistic in its detail, Napoleon, with stunning illustrations, is a work of revelatory range and depth, revealing the contours of the general’s personality and power as no conventional biography can.