Just a man: Demystifying Napoleon
Adam Zamoyski scrapes away layers of lies and exaggeration to reveal Bonaparte in his true, unvarnished colours
Nigel Jones

"Although Adam Zamoyski is at pains to insist that his subject was an ordinary mortal like any other, the simple facts of Bonaparte’s career somewhat belie any attempt to cut the little fellow down to size. How could this second surviving son of an impoverished minor nobleman from an obscure island come, within a few years, to dominate the entire continent, dictate terms to emperors, kings and popes, and set his own siblings on the thrones of the countries he had conquered?... The refreshing distinction of Zamoyski as a biographer is that he humanises Bonaparte — in contrast to others who either hero-worship ‘Napoleon the Great’ (the title of Roberts’s recent adoring life of the emperor) or damn the Corsican usurper as a war-mongering mountebank who devastated Europe and slaughtered millions for the sake of his ego."

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/11/just-a-man-demystifying-napoleon/