Rory Muir
Tactical Advances
Napoleon on War
By Bruno Colson (Translated by Gregory Elliott)
Oxford University Press 484pp £27.99
Napoleon was not a modest man. He had no doubt of his genius, or that it was innate. He was successful because of ‘the special gift I received at birth … Everywhere I have been, I have commanded … I was born for that.’ Luck and good fortune were important, but not decisive:
No sustained great acts are the work of chance and fortune; they always derive from calculation and genius. One rarely sees great men fail in their most perilous endeavours. Take Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, the great Gustavus [Adolphus], and others: they always succeed. Is it because they had good fortune that they became great men? No, but because being great men, they proved capable of mastering good fortune.
He believed that the most necessary quality of a great commander was a cool head and bluntly told his brother Joseph, ‘We are two very different men … Everything goes to your head; you must be impassioned. Nothing goes to my head. Were I at the top of Milan cathedral and precipitated head first to the ground, I would fall calmly looking around me.’ As Bruno Colson, the editor of this fascinating new collection of Napoleon’s views on the nature and art
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk