One of the year's best biographies... A compelling portrait of one of history's greatest figures

McLynn writes with considerable verve: his pithy characterisations of Napoleon's subordinates, the alternating chapters of narrative and analysis, the dramatic set-pieces...all these combine to make his biography pleasurable and highly instructive to read

McLynn offers an admirably clear narrative, neither adulatory nor debunking. He acknowledges and displays the extraordinary tale and does not hide the pettiness

A robust, well-paced biography which pans confidently from the seventeen-year-old child educated by Jesuits to the ruins of the imperial grandeur and death by slow arsenic poisoning on a bleak St Helena

Easily the best of the year's diaries... It proves to be an astonishingly moving and human document

The best political diarist of our times

Reading A. N. Wilson's The Victorians provides ongoing pleasure in handsomely researched, beautifully written prose about an age which we have come to think disparagingly. We thought wrong

The Victorians was one of the books that gave me greatest pleasure during the past year... A brilliant evocation of an age

Rarely have author and subject been found in such deep and contented harmony... Wilson's tour de force

Wilson's panoramic survey is the best attempt so far to describe and explain what was happening in that fascinating time

The Victorians finds Wilson writing at the height of his powers

I can't recall a history book furnishing so many laughs en route ... The Victorians is a work of scholarship, a labour of love, a persusasive polemic