The rumbustious true story of the Victorian master thief who was the model for Conan Doyle’s Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’ arch-rival. From the bestselling author of ‘Operation Mincemeat’ and ‘Agent Zigzag’.
Did Napoleon provide the model for Hitler's Final Solution?140 years before the Holocaust, Napoleon used gas to exterminate the civil population of the Antilles, he created concentration camps in Corsica and Alba, and he re-established the slave trade, provoking the deaths of over 200,000 Africans in the French colonies. In this riveting and controversial expose, Ribbe reveals Napoleon's shocking legacy to the atrocities of the twentieth century.
Prepare for blockbuster action in the vein of Clive Cussler and Alistair Maclean A mesmerizing international thriller that sweeps from modern Iceland to Nazi Germany. In 1945, a German bomber crash-lands in Iceland durign a blizzard. Puzzlingly, there are both German and American officers on board. One of the senior German officers claims that their best chance of survival is to try to walk to the nearest farm. He sets off, a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, only to disappear into the white vastness. Flash forward to the present. The U.S. Army is clandestinely trying to remove the wreck of an airplane from an Icelandic glacier. A young Icelander, Elias, inadvertently stumbles upon the excavation and then promptly disappears. Before he vanishes, though, he manages to contact his sister, Kristin. She embarks on a thrilling and perilous adventure, determined to discover the truth of her brother's fate. Kristin must solve the riddle of Operation Napoleon, even if it means losing her own life. Arnaldur Indridason has proven himself to be a master of the mystery genre with his critically acclaimed Inspector Erlunder series, which has sold more than 6 million copies. Now, world-class writing and nonstop action meet in this spellbinding page-turner, which catapults Arnaldur Indridason to the top ranks of international thriller writers.
The history books say that Napoleon died of natural causes. Napoleon himself, expiring at 51 after a lifetime of robust health, suspected otherwise and ordered a thorough autopsy. His suspicions were well-founded. So clever was the crime, however, that until recent developments in forensic science, it was impossible to prove a case of murder, let alone name the killer. Now, the authors of this fascinating book assert, it has been done-by a brilliant man whose 20-year inquest, a feat of detection, has produced one of history’s greatest surprises. What the critics say: "History at its most electrifying" - Newsweek "A nonfiction whodunit based on modern scientific technique" - New York Times "A spellbinding whodunit about one of history's greatest crimes" - History Book Club "Sensational ... as gripping as a detective novel yet scrupulously observant of historical fact" - Publishers Weekly "Thoroughly convincing... A major Odyssey in historical research" - Harold C. Deutsch, professor of military history, U.S. Army War College
In the first of the Napoleonic Murders series, described as a 'splendid war epic' by Sunday Telegraph, Napoleon begins his invasion of Russia. June 1812. Napoleon leads the largest army Europe has ever seen in his invasion of Russia. But amongst the troops of the Grande Armée is a savage murderer whose bloodlust is not satisfied in battle. When an innocent Polish woman is brutally stabbed, Captain Quentin Margont of the 84th regiment is put in charge of a secret investigation to unmask the perpetrator. Armed with the sole fact that the killer is an officer, Margont knows that he faces a near-impossible task and the greatest challenge of his military career.
One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May "A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal A captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from Venice Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness—to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization—and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.
Professor James Moriarty, prominent scientist, keen analytical mind, and a dabbler in less than savoury doings, is somewhat surprised when an unknown caller is shot by a crossbow bolt on his doorstep. Meanwhile the Professor's one-time associates, the journalist Benjamin Barnett and his wife, the former Cecily Perrine, are having their own troubles on the Continent. Things turn deadly when they find themselves in the midst of an attempted assassination of a German prince, and in Vienna, the younger son of a British nobleman—indulging in "The Great Game" of amateur spying—finds himself framed for the murder of his paramour and the assassination of an Austrian Duke. While a lesser man might be daunted, Moriarty is merely intrigued. With the unwanted help of his often nemesis Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty must connect the many threads of the mystery. But he is facing his most cunning opponent to date, and this is no game...
Since the Second World War, art crime has shifted from a relatively innocuous, often ideological crime, into a major international problem, considered by some to be the third-highest grossing criminal trade worldwide. This rich volume features essays on art crime by the most respected and knowledgeable experts in this interdisciplinary subject.
Popular and scholarly history presents a one-dimensional image of Napoleon as an inveterate instigator of war who repeatedly sought large-scale military conquests. General Franceschi and Ben Weider dismantle this false conclusion in The Wars Against Napoleon, a brilliantly written and researched study that turns our understanding of the French emperor on its head. Avoiding the simplistic clichés and rudimentary caricatures many historians use when discussing Napoleon, Franceschi and Weider argue persuasively that the caricature of the megalomaniac conqueror who bled Europe white to satisfy his delirious ambitions and insatiable love for war is groundless. By carefully scrutinizing the facts of the period and scrupulously avoiding the sometimes confusing cause and effect of major historical events, they paint a compelling portrait of a fundamentally pacifist Napoleon, one completely at odds with modern scholarly thought. This rigorous intellectual presentation is based upon three principal themes. The first explains how an unavoidable belligerent situation existed after the French Revolution of 1789. The new France inherited by Napoleon was faced with the implacable hatred of reactionary European monarchies determined to restore the ancient regime. All-out war was therefore inevitable unless France renounced the modern world to which it had just painfully given birth. The second theme emphasizes Napoleon’s determined efforts (“bordering on an obsession,” argue the authors) to avoid this inevitable conflict. The political strategy of the Consulate and the Empire was based on the intangible principle of preventing or avoiding these wars, not on conquering territory. Finally, the authors examine, conflict by conflict, the evidence that Napoleon never declared war. As he later explained at Saint Helena, it was he who was always attacked—not the other way around. His adversaries pressured and even forced the Emperor to employ his unequalled military genius. After each of his memorable victories Napoleon offered concessions, often extravagant ones, to the defeated enemy for the sole purpose of avoiding another war. Lavishly illustrated, persuasively argued, and carefully illustrated with original maps and battle diagrams, The Wars Against Napoleon presents a courageous and uniquely accurate historical idea that will surely arouse vigorous debate within the international historical community.