Napoleon
Moving statues
Sculptural topplings provide an index of changing times, says Martin Gayford
Coming up for air
Gosh what a breath of fresh air was Andrew Davies’s War & Peace adaptation (BBC1, Sundays) after all the stale…
A tale of cloaks and daggers
You don’t need to know the opera Tosca to understand and enjoy this book about Puccini’s most notorious villain, Vitellio…
One événement after another
The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during…
Awfully arrayed
John Keegan, perhaps the greatest British military historian of recent years, felt that the most important book (because of its…
Facing their Waterloo
The French would still prefer to think of Napoleon’s last defeat as a moral victory
Pet rescue
I adore Andrew Roberts. We go back a long way. Once, on a boating expedition gone wrong in the south…
Designer fatigue
Different concepts of luxury may be inferred from a comparison of the wedding feast of Charles Bovary and Emma Rouault…
One dark summer’s day
Of all the big battalions of books marking the bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo that have come my way,…
Transported by Tolstoy
To have listened to Radio 4’s marathon ten-hour adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as it was being broadcast on…
Letters
The state of Italy… Sir: Ambassador Terracciano’s letter (Letters, 1 November) about Nicholas Farrell’s article (‘The dying man of Europe’,…
Diary
To the British embassy in Paris for a colloquium on ‘Napoleon and Wellington in War and Peace’ organised by our…
The Unbeaten vs the Unbeatable
The Kaiser’s war deprived Britain of her centenary celebrations of the victory at Waterloo. It also set the propagandists something…
Corsica
Napoleon’s birthplace, Casa Buona-parte, in Ajaccio, Corsica’s capital, is pretty grand. It has high ceilings, generous, silk-lined rooms and a…
Barometer
Paisley power Paisley pyjamas were in the news. While associated with the town in Renfrewshire, whose mills produced the patterns from 1805,…
Napoleon’s last victory
If you visit Waterloo today, there’s no question which general comes out on top
Cannon and ball
David Crane on an old soldier’s account of a 200-year-old battle that will never fade away
Osborne’s Waterloo
The defence of Hougoumont is one of the great British feats of arms. If the farmhouse had fallen to Bonaparte’s…
Hiding in plain sight
A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to…
