Madame de Pompadour

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Andrew Roberts

"It has become all too common for Napoleon Bonaparte's biographers to approach him as a figure to be reviled, bent on world domination, practically a proto-Hitler. Here, after years of study extending even to visits paid to St Helena and 53 of Napoleon's 56 battlefields, Andrew Roberts has created a true portrait of the mind, the life, and the military and above all political genius of a fundamentally constructive ruler. This is the Napoleon, Roberts reminds us, whose peacetime activity produced countless indispensable civic innovations - and whose Napoleonic Code provided the blueprint for civil law systems still in use around the world today. It is one of the greatest lives in world history, which here has found its ideal biographer. The sheer enjoyment which this book will give anyone who loves history is enormous."--Provided by publisher. From Andrew Roberts, author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Storm of War, this is the definitive modern biography of Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte lived one of the most extraordinary of all human lives. In the space of just twenty years, from October 1795 when as a young artillery captain he cleared the streets of Paris of insurrectionists, to his final defeat at the (horribly mismanaged) battle of Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon transformed France and Europe. After seizing power in a coup d'etat he ended the corruption and incompetence into which the Revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace, he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful 'Empire style' in the arts.

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Paul Murray Kendall

This clever French king earned his lively nickname by determined pursuit of the unification of France. "The universal spider" refers to his guile and practiced manipulation of competing magnates. Paul

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Anne-Marie Eddé

Working simultaneously on two levels, Saladin represents the best kind of biography -- a portrait of a man who is said to have made an age, and the most complete account we have to date of an age that made the man. Unlike biographies that focus on Saladin's military exploits, especially the recapturing of Jerusalem from European Crusaders in 1187, Eddé's narrative draws on an incredible array of contemporary sources to develop the fullest picture possible of a ruler shaped profoundly by the complex Arabian political environment in which he rose to prominence. The result is a unique view of the Crusades from an Arab perspective. Saladin became a legend in his own time, venerated by friend and foe alike as a paragon of justice, chivalry, and generosity. Arab politicians ever since have sought to claim his mantle as a justification for their own exercise of power. But Saladin's world-historical status as the ideal Muslim ruler owes its longevity to a tacit agreement among contemporaries and later chroniclers about the set of virtues Saladin possessed—virtues that can now be tested against a rich tapestry of historical research. This tension between the mythical image of Saladin, layered over centuries and deployed in service of specific moral and political objectives, and the verifiable facts of his life available to a judicious modern historian is what sustains Anne-Marie Eddé's erudite biography, published to acclaim in France in 2008 and offered here in smooth, readable English translation. - Publisher.

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Charles Ross

Richard III ruled England for a mere twenty-six months, yet few English monarchs remain as compulsively fascinating, and none has been more persistently vilified. In his absorbing and universally praised account, Charles Ross assesses the king within the context of his violent age and explores the critical questions of the reign: why and how Richard Plantagenet usurped the throne; the belief that he ordered the murder of "the Princes in the Tower"; the events leading to the battle of Bosworth in 1485; and the death of the Yorkist dynasty with Richard himself. In a new foreword, Professor Richard A. Griffiths identifies the attributes that have made Ross's account the leading biography in the field, and assesses the impact of the research published since the book first appeared in 1981. "A fascinating study on a perennially fascinating topic… the base against which will be measured any future research."--Times Higher Education Supplement