HISTORY NAPOLEON: A LIFE IN GARDENS AND SHADOWS by Ruth Scurr (Chatto £30, 400 pp) In 1814, a few days after Napoleon abdicated as Emperor of France, the British artist Benjamin Robert Haydon stopped his coach to offer a lift to a battle-weary French grenadier. ‘If Bonaparte had reigned longer,’ the young soldier told him, … Read more
A stable democracy doesn’t threaten to cut off its neighbour’s energy supplies. That is the sort of behaviour we associate with rogue states. Putin’s Russia, for example, sometimes resorts to ‘gas diplomacy’ to browbeat Ukraine and other nearby states. An energy blockade is calculatedly bellicose — if not exactly an act of war, then certainly … Read more
The sense of desperation and decay hits you in the most unlikely places, especially on the Champs-Élysées itself – the famed thoroughfare acknowledged as the most beautiful in the world. But today there are piles of rubbish, vagrants with nobody to beg from, and lines of high-end shops, cafés and restaurants with security grills permanently … Read more
The sense of desperation and decay hits you in the most unlikely places, especially on the Champs-Élysées itself – the famed thoroughfare acknowledged as the most beautiful in the world. But today there are piles of rubbish, vagrants with nobody to beg from, and lines of high-end shops, cafés and restaurants with security grills permanently … Read more
Jodie Comer tipped to star as Josephine opposite Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte in Ridley Scott epic By Rachel Mcgrath For Dailymail.com Published: 06:18 GMT, 3 March 2021 | Updated: 06:18 GMT, 3 March 2021 She’s played an English princess and a psychopathic assassin on her way to stardom. And now Jodie Comer looks set … Read more