Adam Zamoyski

Napoleon's Fatal March

Moscow 1812

When Adam Zamoyski first wrote his history of Poland, in the 1980s, the country was in a state of subjugation, its living culture largely surviving only underground or in exile. Although the election of Karol Wojty?a as Pope John Paul II and the dramatic rise of Solidarno?? had brought Poland into the world's consciousness, it was not until the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989 that it returned to life as a political entity.No nation's history has been so distorted as that of Poland. In 1797 Russia, Prussia and Austria divided the country up among themselves, rewriting history to give the impression that Poland had never been a fully sovereign state, only a backwater that needed civilising. In fact the country they had wiped off the map had been one of the largest and most richly varied in Europe, embracing a wide variety of cultural and religious traditions, accommodated within one of the boldest constitutional experiments ever attempted. Its destruction initiated a series of struggles that culminated in the two world wars and the Cold War.Today, after the turmoil of the past two centuries, Poland has been restored to its rightful place as one of the most homogeneous and vigorous nations of Europe. Adam Zamoyski's full revision of his classic history is perfectly timed.

A History

Poland

'Napoleon is an out-and-out masterpiece and a joy to read' Sir Antony Beevor, author of StalingradA landmark new biography that presents the man behind the many myths. The first writer in English to go back to the original European sources, Adam Zamoyski's portrait of Napoleon is historical biography at its finest. Napoleon inspires passionately held and often conflicting visions. Was he a god-like genius, Romantic avatar, megalomaniac monster, compulsive warmonger or just a nasty little dictator? While he displayed elements of these traits at certain times, Napoleon was none of these things. He was a man and, as Adam Zamoyski presents him in this landmark biography, a rather ordinary one at that. He exhibited some extraordinary qualities during some phases of his life but it is hard to credit genius to a general who presided over the worst (and self-inflicted) disaster in military history and who single-handedly destroyed the great enterprise he and others had toiled so hard to construct. A brilliant tactician, he was no strategist. But nor was Napoleon an evil monster. He could be selfish and violent but there is no evidence of him wishing to inflict suffering gratuitously. His motives were mostly praiseworthy and his ambition no greater than that of contemporaries such as Alexander I of Russia, Wellington, Nelson and many more. What made his ambition exceptional was the scope it was accorded by circumstance. Adam Zamoyski strips away the lacquer of prejudice and places Napoleon the man within the context of his times. In the 1790s, a young Napoleon entered a world at war, a bitter struggle for supremacy and survival with leaders motivated by a quest for power and by self-interest. He did not start this war but it dominated his life and continued, with one brief interruption, until his final defeat in 1815. Based on primary sources in many European languages, and beautifully illustrated with portraits done only from life, this magnificent book examines how Napoleone Buonaparte, the boy from Corsica, became 'Napoleon'; how he achieved what he did, and how it came about that he undid it. It does not justify or condemn but seeks instead to understand Napoleon's extraordinary trajectory.

Napoleon

Examines the culture of fear that pervaded the halls of European monarchs after the French Revolution and argues that the extreme measures taken by these rulers to quash unrest may have in fact incited it.

Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848

Phantom Terror

A New Biography

Chopin

Lenin's failed conquest of Europe

Warsaw 1920

Traces the epic events following Napoleon's exile in 1814 and the subsequent Treaty of Paris, examining how the eight-month Viennese carnival brought thousands of aristocrats to the Austrian capital and established the Congress of Vienna, an effort that the author contends exacted a substantially high price in exchange for a century of peace. 25,000 first printing.

The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

Rites of Peace

Polska

Fascinating biography of the last King of Poland, and an account of a personal dream with all the elements of Grand tragedy. Young King Stanislaw Antoni Poniatowski was a perfect illustration of the contradictions of Europe's ideological and religious viewpoints: worshipped reason but was led by the heart. Stanislaw was eventually obliged to watch the destruction of his lifes work, and ultimately forced to abdicate, a broken man, deceived and disillusioned.

The Last King of Poland

Aimed at a wide popular market and those interested in Napoleon and military and European history, this is an epic account of Napoleon's invasion of Russia and subsequent retreat from Moscow, which had a profound effect on the subsequent course of Russian and European history. Originally published: London: HarperCollins, 2004.

Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow

1812

A Biography

The Man Behind the Myth

The dramatic and little-known story of how, in the summer of 1920, Lenin came within a hair's breadth of shattering the painstakingly constructed Versailles peace settlement and spreading Bolshevism to western Europe.

Warsaw 1920: Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe

Following on from his epic ‘1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow’, bestselling author Adam Zamoyski has written the dramatic story of the Congress of Vienna.

Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna

Adam Zamoyski’s bestselling account of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and his catastrophic retreat from Moscow, events that had a profound effect on European history.

1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow

‘Napoleon is an out-and-out masterpiece and a joy to read’ Sir Antony Beevor, author of Stalingrad A landmark new biography that presents the man behind the many myths. The first writer in English to go back to the original European sources, Adam Zamoyski’s portrait of Napoleon is historical biography at its finest.

Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth

A new edition of Adam Zamoyski's definitive biography of Chopin, first published in 1979 and unavailable in English for many years.

From America's fight for independence to the Paris Commune - an exotic collection of fanatics, adventurers, poets and thinkers are brought vividly to life. Holy Madness probes into the psyche that was responsible for so many of the founding events of our modern world, and into the instincts that inspired its most generous and most murderous impulses. It explains how the Enlightenment dislodged Christianity from its central position in the life of European societies and how man's quest for ecstasy and transcendence flooded into areas such as the arts, spawning the Romantic movement. This dramatic journey which begins in America in 1776 and goes right up to the last agony of the Paris Commune in 1871, takes in the French revolution, the Irish rebellion, the Polish risings, the war of Greek liberation, the Russian insurrection, the Hungarian struggles for freedom, the liberation of South America, and the Italian Risorgimento. 'An ambitious and in many ways brilliant book' Hilary Mantel

Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots And Revolutionaries 1776-1871

A completely new edition of the definitive biography of Chopin, unavailable for many years, by one of the finest of contemporary European historians.

A magnificent and timely examination of an age of fear, subversion, suppression and espionage, Adam Zamoyski explores the attempts of the governments of Europe to police the world in a struggle against obscure forces, seemingly dedicated to the overthrow of civilisation.

Adam Zamoyski

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