Basket.

What, a whole week already?

Though I have read some excellent analytical history (Hobsbawm springs readily to mind), it is narrative history I will always prefer by a great margin. I do admire keen, incisive dissection of historical events, but a spell-binding narration of the selfsame events will always attract me more. After all, who doesn't like a good story? The best history books I have read have been narrative. No one can deny the literary prowess of Pulitzer Prize winner John Toland (I have read his The Last Hundred Days cover-to-cover three times), or Sir Martin Gilbert, honoured and knighted for his majestic biography of Winston Churchill. I have never had the pleasure of reading in full the most well-known works of William Manchester (The American Caesar), Stephen Ambrose or Cornelius Ryan (The Longest Day), but what I have read has enchanted me. Even Erik Durschmied, not a trained historian, has produced some work of wonderful detail that makes for very enjoyable reading.

This is not counting the myriad authors, not half as well-known, whose works I have read and found brilliant as well. It is a pity I cannot remember them all.

Now I may just have discovered such a work. 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow, by Adam Zamoyski, is a history book practically fresh out of the oven, having been published just this year. I have heard that over 250,000 books have been written about Napoleon and the Napoleonic era, and I have myself read a not inconsiderable number. Yet this one impresses me. A masterpiece of narrative history, it examines Napoleon's pivotal Russian campaign of 1812-13 in astounding detail, drawing from a vast range of sources, some that have only very recently become available. Presenting both a broad overview and a micro outlook on an event that quite literally changed Europe and the world, it is able to present to the reader both the sheer magnitude and impact of the events it describes and impart a human element I have heretofore never seen within one of the most brutal actions ever fought between two opposing sides. A human face on a war to the knife. No mean feat, indeed. The testimonies of so many from both sides, of the troubles and minor inconveniences of war, of the fear and paradoxical exhilaration felt by soldiers about to enter their first battle, of Napoleon's mistakes and idiosyncracies (the "Corsican Ogre", human after all), of his opposing number Alexander's own habits and character traits... too many for me to list. One ends up with a degree of sympathy and respect for these men, who fought and suffered and died, most senselessly, in the wastes of Europe over two hundred years ago.

And to me, that is something only the best history books can do. Not listing long-dead facts and figures, not giving pages upon pages of bone-dry analysis, but giving people of the present an idea of how people before them lived and died and suffered, reconciled with how the great events they were mere cogs within changed and shaped the world we currently exist in.