The Napoleon of Crime

Author: Ben Macintyre
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307886476
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Prisoners in the Castle, a dramatic portrait of the master thief of the nineteenth century: Adam Worth “Fascinating . . . a brisk, lively, colorful biography of an amazing criminal.”—The New York Times (Best Books of the Year) The Victorian era’s most infamous and iconic thief, the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes’s Professor Moriarty, Adam Worth was known as the Napoleon of crime. Suave, cunning, and fearless, Worth learned early that the best way to succeed was to steal. And steal he did. Following a strict code of honor, Worth won the respect of Victorian society. He also aroused its fear by becoming a chilling phantom, mingling undetected with the upper classes, whose valuables he brazenly stole. His most celebrated heist: Gainsborough’s grand portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire—ancestor of Diana, Princess of Wales—a painting Worth adored and often slept with for twenty years. With a brilliant gang that included “Piano” Charley, a jewel thief, train robber, and playboy, and “the Scratch” Becker, master forger, Worth secretly ran operations from New York to London, Paris, and South Africa—until betrayal and a Pinkerton man finally brought him down. The Napoleon of Crime is a grand, dazzling tour into the gaslit underworld of the nineteenth century, and into the doomed genius of a criminal mastermind.

Napoleon's Crimes

Author: Claude Ribbe
Publisher: One World (UK)
ISBN: 9781851685332
Category : Atrocities
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Did Napoleon provide the model for Hitler's Final Solution?140 years before the Holocaust, Napoleon used gas to exterminate the civil population of the Antilles, he created concentration camps in Corsica and Alba, and he re-established the slave trade, provoking the deaths of over 200,000 Africans in the French colonies. In this riveting and controversial expose, Ribbe reveals Napoleon's shocking legacy to the atrocities of the twentieth century.

The Great Game

Author: Michael Kurland
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312305055
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
Labeled the "Napoleon of Crime" by an obsessed Sherlock Holmes, Professor James Moriarty is a prominent scientist, a keen analytical mind, and a dabbler in less than savory doings. Two friends and former associates of Moriarty - Benjamin Barnett and his wife, the former Cecily Perrine - are travelling in Europe in early 1891 when they realize that they have become objects of scrutiny from persons unknown. Things turn deadly when they find themselves in the midst of an attempted assassination of a German prince. Meanwhile in Vienna, the younger son of a British nobleman - indulging in what was then known as "The Great Game" of amateur spying - finds himself framed for the murder of his paramour and the assassination of an Austrian Duke. In London, an unknown caller arrives at Moriarty's door on a matter of great urgency. But before Moriarty can be summoned to speak with him, the stranger is shot by a crossbow bolt loosed by unseen hands. While a lesser man might be daunted, Moriarty is merely intrigued and begins to investigate. What Moriarty uncovers is a cabal that seems to be using assassination to destabilize the rule of the crowned heads of Europe. But he also senses that there is something even bigger than this operating - a conspiracy behind the conspiracy - and detects the workings of a mind quite possibly as clever as his own. Using his contacts, friends, and the not-so-desired help of his often nemesis Sherlock Holmes, Moriarty must save his friends and outwit his most cunning opponent while the fate of history hangs in the balance.

A Spy Among Friends

Author: Ben Macintyre
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408851725
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
From bestselling author Ben Macintyre, the true untold story of history's most famous traitor

Plunder

Author: Cynthia Saltzman
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374710392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Book Description
One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May "A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal A captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from Venice Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness—to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization—and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

The Adventure of the Six Napoleons

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
Publisher: Modernista
ISBN: 918094583X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 28

Book Description
»The Adventure of the Six Napoleons« is a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, about the brilliant Victorian detective Sherlock Holmes. It was first published in 1904. SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE [1859-1930], was a Scottish physician and author, best known for his stories about the groundbreaking master detective Sherlock Holmes. Doyle wrote a total of 56 short stories and four novels about Sherlock Holmes and his constant companion Dr. Watson.

A Brief History of Crime

Author: Peter Hitchens
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
Crime is a political football - both left and right are terrified of seeming soft on the issue, but for all their efforts, or apparent efforts, crime rates continue to rise. Clearly something needs to be done. But what? Peter Hitchens argues that the time has come to re-examine the criminal justice system root and branch - to cope with rising levels of violent crime, and to restore public faith in society's ability to defend itself. Whatever you think of the solutions Hitchens suggests to this problem, you can be sure that they will excite controversy.

Wars Against Napoleon

Author: General Michel Franceschi
Publisher: Savas Beatie
ISBN: 1611210291
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Book Description
Popular and scholarly history presents a one-dimensional image of Napoleon as an inveterate instigator of war who repeatedly sought large-scale military conquests. General Franceschi and Ben Weider dismantle this false conclusion in The Wars Against Napoleon, a brilliantly written and researched study that turns our understanding of the French emperor on its head. Avoiding the simplistic clichés and rudimentary caricatures many historians use when discussing Napoleon, Franceschi and Weider argue persuasively that the caricature of the megalomaniac conqueror who bled Europe white to satisfy his delirious ambitions and insatiable love for war is groundless. By carefully scrutinizing the facts of the period and scrupulously avoiding the sometimes confusing cause and effect of major historical events, they paint a compelling portrait of a fundamentally pacifist Napoleon, one completely at odds with modern scholarly thought. This rigorous intellectual presentation is based upon three principal themes. The first explains how an unavoidable belligerent situation existed after the French Revolution of 1789. The new France inherited by Napoleon was faced with the implacable hatred of reactionary European monarchies determined to restore the ancient regime. All-out war was therefore inevitable unless France renounced the modern world to which it had just painfully given birth. The second theme emphasizes Napoleon’s determined efforts (“bordering on an obsession,” argue the authors) to avoid this inevitable conflict. The political strategy of the Consulate and the Empire was based on the intangible principle of preventing or avoiding these wars, not on conquering territory. Finally, the authors examine, conflict by conflict, the evidence that Napoleon never declared war. As he later explained at Saint Helena, it was he who was always attacked—not the other way around. His adversaries pressured and even forced the Emperor to employ his unequalled military genius. After each of his memorable victories Napoleon offered concessions, often extravagant ones, to the defeated enemy for the sole purpose of avoiding another war. Lavishly illustrated, persuasively argued, and carefully illustrated with original maps and battle diagrams, The Wars Against Napoleon presents a courageous and uniquely accurate historical idea that will surely arouse vigorous debate within the international historical community.

Rogue Heroes

Author: Ben Macintyre
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 1101904178
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The incredible untold story of World War II’s greatest secret fighting force, as told by the modern master of wartime intrigue—now a limited series on Epix! “Reads like a mashup of The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape, with a sprinkling of Ocean’s 11 thrown in for good measure.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times ONE OF NPR’S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “Rogue Heroes is a ripping good read.”—Washington Post (10 Best Books of the Year) Britain’s Special Air Service—or SAS—was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young aristocrat whose aimlessness belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a World War II battlefield map and saw a protracted struggle, Stirling saw an opportunity: given a small number of elite men, he could parachute behind Nazi lines and sabotage their airplanes and supplies. Defying his superiors’ conventional wisdom, Stirling assembled a revolutionary fighting force that would upend not just the balance of the war, but the nature of combat itself. Bringing his keen eye for detail to a riveting wartime narrative, Ben Macintyre uses his unprecedented access to the SAS archives to shine a light on a legendary unit long shrouded in secrecy.

The Murder of Napoleon

Author: Ben Weider
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1583481508
Category : France
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
The history books say that Napoleon died of natural causes. Napoleon himself, expiring at 51 after a lifetime of robust health, suspected otherwise and ordered a thorough autopsy. His suspicions were well-founded. So clever was the crime, however, that until recent developments in forensic science, it was impossible to prove a case of murder, let alone name the killer. Now, the authors of this fascinating book assert, it has been done-by a brilliant man whose 20-year inquest, a feat of detection, has produced one of history’s greatest surprises. What the critics say: "History at its most electrifying" - Newsweek "A nonfiction whodunit based on modern scientific technique" - New York Times "A spellbinding whodunit about one of history's greatest crimes" - History Book Club "Sensational ... as gripping as a detective novel yet scrupulously observant of historical fact" - Publishers Weekly "Thoroughly convincing... A major Odyssey in historical research" - Harold C. Deutsch, professor of military history, U.S. Army War College