This lecture will explore Napoleon‘s life through his interactions with the natural world and a series of gardens that were important to him during the rise and fall of his power.
The point of doing this is to approach his life from oblique angles, exploring material that is often overlooked. It is also a way of evoking the dramatic trajectory of his life.
Ruth is a British writer, historian and literary critic. She is a Fellow of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge.
Her first book, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 2006; Metropolitan Books, 2006) won the Franco-British Society Literary Prize (2006), was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize (2006), long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize (2007) and was listed among the 100 Best Books of the Decade in The Times in 2009.
