Written with great wit & panache, this biography also has a serious purpose: to make us face up to the moral bankruptcy of Napoleons dictatorship. Johnson tells the whole story: his astonishing gift for figures & calculation, his mastery of cannon; his audacious, hyperactive & aggressive generalship & his simple battle tactics; his complete control of propaganda & the success of the cultural presentation of the Empire; the Code Napoleon; his failure as an international statesman, as Europe grew to hate him; his marshals & ministers; his wives, mistresses, personal style & working methods; the British blockade & the Continental System; the mistakes in Spain & Russia. The escape from Elba, the events leading up to Waterloo & the battle itself, which gets a full treatment, is particularly riveting.