Biography & Memoir

NAPOLEON

A LIFE IN GARDENS AND SHADOWS

RUTH SCURR

Chatto & Windus, 400pp, £30

‘Improbably glorious and exceptionally herbaceous,’ was Simon Schama’s pronouncement in the Financial Times. ‘Scurr has achieved something remarkable: a completely original book on a completely unoriginal subject.’ For David Crane in the Spectator there was ‘little in this book that suggests that Napoleon’s ideas about gardens or his tastes were original or interesting, and yet the man we see through these gardens – the lover of straight lines and grandiose schemes – is only too recognisably the same centralising, controlling micro-manager who set out to impose his will on Europe and his civil code on France’. Crane praised the book’s ‘rich details, fresh perspectives... [and] a different cast of characters’.

In his review for the Times, Paul Lay wrote that Scurr ‘brings shades of subtlety and nuance to a life well known... She can write, beautifully; and she casts a cold eye on proceedings, unfazed by previous adoration or condemnation of her subject... Napoleon’s horticultural ambitions on Saint Helena mirrored those of his previous military campaigns, albeit on a much smaller scale. His workers complained of tiredness, but they were unrelenting in their efforts to please him as they created a world from unsympathetic soil, a shady idyll for a man who once bestrode Europe.’ Scurr’s book, wrote Caroline Moorehead in the Literary Review, is ‘history at its most enjoyable, a discursive ramble along its edges, away from matters of power and into its byways’. It is ‘a delight to read’ and ‘must have been an immense pleasure to research’.

BEAUTIFUL THINGS

A MEMOIR

HUNTER BIDEN

Simon & Schuster, 255pp, £20

Together with his late brother Beau, President Biden’s other son Hunter was a toddler when he survived the car accident in which their mother and sister were killed. His memoir is ‘both an easy book to review, ‘because to read it is to listen to a man recount a journey into despair: the end of a marriage, a return to alcoholism, crack addiction and an attempt to push away the people who love him’. While she found it ‘moving in its reflections on pain and grief’ and ‘at its best when the author reflects on addiction – how powerful and merciless and all-consuming it can be’, she said that ‘the weakest parts of the book, by far, are Hunter’s political analysis and considerations’.