Napoleon by Vincent Cronin (PT220)

Published 1972: Hardcover / Very Good Condition / Illustrated throughout

Original beige cloth with gilt titles on the spine and original pictorial dust jacket. 480 very clean and bright pages, speckled foxing on the top edge. Slight shelf wear on the dust jacket and slightly rubbed with time consistent with age.(PT220)

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Reviews:
An excellent biography of Napoleon. Cronin portrays Napoleon as a republican idealist whose ascension to Emperor was solely for the preservation of moderate Republican values. He is very sympathetic to Napoleon pointing out that his wars were generally pre-emptive attacks on monarchies who sought to destory the ideals of the French Revolution. The focus is on his character rather than his accomplishments.

Reviews:
One cannot deny the enthusiasm and symphatetic approach with which Vincent Cronin, sources at hand, tells us about Napoleon Bonaparte.
Cronin's Napoleon is a human and idealist character, who dispenses painful pinches to his wife's and soldiers' cheecks, sucks throat pastilles on the plains of Austerlitz, sings sentimental tunes off key, and, as a classical hero, finds himself tragically unable to escape the boredom and fatal disease of his last exhile. One of the best biographies on the Empereur, not to be missed.

Vincent Archibald Patrick Cronin FRSL (24 May 1924 – 25 January 2011) was a British historical, cultural, and biographical writer, best known for his biographies of Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, and Napoleon, as well as for his books on the Renaissance.

Cronin was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire, to Scottish doctor and novelist, A. J. Cronin, and May Gibson, but moved to London at the age of two. He was educated at Ampleforth College, Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and Trinity College, Oxford, from which he graduated with honours in 1947, earning a degree in Literae Humaniores. During the Second World War, he served as a lieutenant in the British Army.

In 1949, he married Chantal de Rolland, and they had five children. The Cronins were long-time residents of London, Marbella, and Dragey, in Avranches, Normandy, where they lived at the Manoir de Brion.

Cronin was a recipient of the Richard Hillary Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award (1955), and the Rockefeller Foundation Award (1958). He also contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes, was the first General Editor of the Companion Guides series, and was on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.

He died at his home in Marbella on 25 January 2011.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/837088.Napoleon