Napoleon the Great

摘要

There is a tendency to portray the world as so much more complex today than previously. Those lauding such theories should pick up Andrew Roberts' magnum opus on Napoleon in order to gain an appreciation of the complexity that previous leaders dealt with on a daily basis. The sheer number of imponderables that had to be considered and weighed, against almost nothing but informed opinions, shame today's decision-makers who have vast quantities of reliable and credible information with which to make decisions. To Roberts' credit, few books have so successfully captured the scale and complexity of past events, placing them within the context in which they occurred - Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith by D K R Crosswell (University Press of Kentucky, 2010) is another.