Andrew Roberts for Napoleon and His Marshals

In November, we have the supreme pleasure of welcoming internationally renowned, award-winning biographer and historian, Andrew Roberts to the bookshop. His forthcoming book Napoleon and His Marshals is by far the fullest account of Napoleon's Marshalate - its colourful figures and their fiery relationships with the famed Emperor.

In 1804, immediately after his coronation as Emperor, Napoleon created the Marshalate, the supreme martial rank of the empire. Over the next decade, he elevated to it some of his most outstanding generals, who played leading roles in his extraordinary campaigns - including the brave Ney, the flamboyant Murat, the vain Massena, the iron Davout and the logistics master Berthier.

Some of them were son of aristocrats, others of innkeepers or coopers, but all carried the baton of a Marshal of France. Andrew Roberts masterfully captures their personalities and ambitions, capacities and rivalries. But unlike Lincoln, who forged a team of rivals, Napoleon created a nest of vipers whose lust for glory descended into destructive competitiveness and mutual recrimination. For all his inspiring qualities as a leader, he manipulated and controlled those whose loyalty he most needed to survive, and ultimately only two of them rode beside him at Waterloo.

Andrew Roberts - Lord Roberts of Belgravia - is a multi-award-winning biographer and historian of international renown. His books include Salisbury: Victorian Titan, Masters and Commanders, The Storm of War, Napoleon the Great, George III, and Churchill: Walking with Destiny. Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and a Trustee of the International Churchill Society. He is currently Visiting Professor at the Department of War Studies at King's College, London, and the Bonnie and Tom McCloskey Distinguished Visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.