Top Highlights

• Later in life, Napoleon urged his junior officers ‘to read and re-read the campaigns of Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Julius Caesar, Gustavus Adolfus, Prince Eugene and Frederick the Great. This is the only way to become a great captain.’
• (Winston Churchill once observed that in wartime, truth is so precious that she needs to be defended by a bodyguard of lies.)
• squares with his family nickname of ‘Rabulione’, or troublemaker. Given the paucity of trustworthy sources, much of Napoleon’s early childhood must remain conjectural, but there is
• outside, he would read everything he could about the most ambitious leaders of the ancient world.
• the Treaty of Paris of 1763 had cut France out of the great continental landmasses (and markets) of India and North America, and by the time he was a teenager Britain was busily colonizing Australia too.