Charles Esdaile: 7 books

A panoramic chronicle of Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power—excerpted from celebrated historian Charles Esdaile’s masterwork Napoleon’s Wars Napoleon’s Wars offers a definitive account of the violent conflicts that seethed within Europe from the end of the Peace of Amiens in 1803...

At the end of the 18th century Spain remained one of the world's most powerful empires. Portugal, too, was prosperous at the time. By 1808, everything had changed. Portugal was under occupation and ravaged by famine, disease, economic problems and political instability. Spain had imploded and worse...

Many books have been written about the British struggle against Napoleon in the Peninsula. A few recent studies have given a broader view of the ebb and flow of a long war that had a shattering impact on Spain and Portugal and marked the history of all the nations involved. But none of these books...

A glorious?and conclusive?chronicle of the wars waged by one of the most polarizing figures in military history Acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic as a new standard on the subject, this sweeping, boldly written history of the Napoleonic era reveals its central protagonist as a man driven...

A highly original and critical introduction to the revolutionary and napoleonic conflicts. It illuminates the less well-known areas of the subject, such as the changing atttitude of the French people towards Napoleon, as well as providing a balanced account of the campaigns of Wellington and Napoleon. Based...

In the iconography of the Peninsular War of 1808–14, women are well represented—both as heroines, such as Agustina Zaragosa Domenech, and as victims, whether of starvation or of French brutality. In history, however, with its focus on high politics and military operations, they are invisible—a...

So great is the weight of reading on the subject of the Waterloo campaign that it might be thought there is nothing left to say about it, and from the military viewpoint, this is very much the case. But one critical aspect of the story has gone all but untold – the French home front. Little has...