A sweeping single-volume life of Napoleon Bonaparte, drawn from his thirty-three thousand surviving letters.
Books mentioned in Napoleon: A Life (6)
Clisson et Eugene by Napoleon: “Napoleon plenty of time to write a romantic novella entitled Clisson et Eugénie, a swansong for his unrequited love affair with Désirée.”
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “it was either consciously or unconsciously influenced by Goethe's celebrated novel of 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther, which Napoleon read no fewer than six times during the Egyptian campaign”
Henry V by William Shakespeare: “Shakespeare's St Crispin Day's speech from Henry V can also be detected in such lines”
The Spirit of the Laws by Montesquieu: “including Captain Cook's three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and books by Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Tacitus and, of course, Julius Caesar.”
Voyages by James Cook: “Napoleon also took 125 books of history, geography, philosophy and Greek mythology in a specially constructed library, including Captain Cook's three-volume Voyages, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther”