A Life of Prince Talleyrand

Napoleon's Master

A vivid and brilliant life - the first for more than 70 years - of one of the greatest and most fascinating statesmen of all time.

A fast-moving romp through Talleyrand's life, engagingly admiring of its subject and appreciative of his many qualities

A brisk and enjoyable book...an extraordinary story

Napoleon's Master dwells particularly on Talleyrand's struggle, as a man of peace, to restrain a genius of war. But it is alive also with the world of the Paris salon and the glittering connections of a most sociable diplomat

A lucid and readable account of Talleyrand's career

Enjoyably written, well balanced and clearly sympathetic

There was clearly something prodigious about the resilience of 'Old Talley', and David Lawday's biography helps to explain how and why this icon of the Perigordian aristocracy was able to make himself indispensable to France's post-revolutionary rulers

This is the most accurate picture we have yet had of this `elusive' survivor.

David Lawday is a native of London, educated there and at Oxford. He is a writer and journalist who was a correspondent for twenty years with The Economist, now based in Paris where his son and daughter grew up and where he lives with his French wife.

He took on Napoleon with a set of weapons that seemed unsuited to the task: flattery, courtesy and an alarmingly straight face. And he won. Quite as much as the Duke of Wellington it was the club-footed genius of French diplomacy who defeated the greatest conqueror since Julius Caesar. This is the story of Prince Talleyrand, who attracts as much scorn as Napoleon wins glory. To his critics the arch-aristocrat who delivered France and all Europe from the Emperor's follies is the prince of vice - turncoat, hypocrite, liar, plotter, God-baiter and womanizer, and, to make matters worse, highly successful at them all. 
 
In this life of the master diplomat, David Lawday follows Talleyrand's remarkable career through the most turbulent age Europe has known and explores - for the first time - in intimate detail his extraordinarily perverse relationship with Napoleon. The richly flawed and abundantly gifted character laid bare by David Lawday is the man to whom diplomats continue to look today for the subtlest tricks of the negotiator's art. A good 150 years before a united Europe came into being, Talleyrand's actions laid the ground for it - as they have for a permanent peace now enduring for two centuries between France and her oldest enemy, Britain.

David Lawday

Danton: Gentle Giant of Terror 
 
In this new biography, David Lawday, author of the acclaimed Napoleon's Master, a life of Talleyrand, turns his focus to the life of Georges-Jacques Danton, tragic hero incarnate. 
 
A beefy six-foot bull of a man, with a rude farmyard face to match, Danton was destined to bring a violent end to an absolute monarchy that had ruled for a thousand years. But it was not his alarming physique that placed him at the head of the Revolution. His weapon of revolt was his voice - a perpetual roll of thunder that spurred men to action without his quite knowing where he intended to drive them. To hear Danton was to hear the heartbeat of revolution. Together with the puritanical Robespierre - his rival to death and in most every way his opposite - Danton brought about something rare in history: a change in the human social order. The reckless ride from monarchy to republic was a mass social revolution that upended the most populous country in Europe - an upheaval so uniquely radical in spirit that formed the root - if not quite of that liberty and equality its makers dreamed of - at least of the liberal, democratic society in which a good part of the world is fairly content to live today. What manner of man makes such stupendous things happen? 
 
With prose that is immediate and engaging, Lawday examines the personalities and the associations that inspired and fuelled the Revolution. The power of Danton's oratory, and his charismatic appeal, led him to the centre of power at the height of a period of turbulent change. But he was to become a victim of Revolution himself, facing the guillotine - defiant to the end - at the age of thirty-four.

David Lawday

Books by David Lawday

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