Ordinary Glories

I forget which biography of Napoleon it is- I read it, pages dusty and his story then fresh to me, as a teenager many years ago- but in it an English historian, pivoting on a Whig pin head so as to look both up at and down upon the little corporal, dedicates a whole paragraph to sneering at his preference for ‘peasant’ cuisine. Amidst the initials and crowns and bees so carefully embroidered in gold, the Terror of Europe would wolf down dishes of beans and onions and pork whilst the Tsars and Kings and Popes whom he confounded quailed over their daintily prepared repasts. If only Gillray had had access to the great tyrant’s stodgy and simplistic menus, how much more eviscerating would that master’s pen and ink have been! Sadly, our histories of Bonaparte- in English at least- focus on those aspects considered worthy; his conquests or his politics or his women. I blame the Romantics. Shelley’s ‘child of a fierce hour’ might have oscillated in their fevered imaginations between bei...

God- and for that matter, my liver- knows I am no Puritan. Now, like anyone interested in the strange nature of the English, I quote with glee Isaac Foot’s method for the discernment of character- ‘I judge a man by one thing, which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor’- but endorsement, as many a Twitter biography, fearful of that malevolent platform’s tendency to turn even nastier than it already is, reminds us, is not necessarily the natural outworking of quotation. I need hardly resort to references from the Almighty, or my organs, to reveal that the late Mr Foot and I- though agreeing on the importance of Marston Moor- would not have been shoulder to shoulder on that windswept patch of land bisected in latter days by the B1224. Yet, for all my cavalier enthusiasm, I find the characters on the side I purport to retrospectively back difficult to relate to. As with all good fiction, the stories we tell about the past are most powerful when, in the i...