In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion--the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs--was also the means of her undoing. Weber's book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history's most controversial figures.

    Nagel brings the formidable Marie-Thérèse to life, along with the age of revolution and the waning days of the aristocracy, in a page-turning biography that will appeal to fans of Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette and Amanda Foreman's Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire.In December 1795, at midnight on her seventeenth birthday, Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, escaped from Paris's notorious Temple Prison. To this day many believe that the real Marie-Thérèse, traumatized following her family's brutal execution during the Reign of Terror, switched identities with an illegitimate half sister who was often mistaken for her twin. Was the real Marie-Thérèse spirited away to a remote castle to live her life as the woman called "the Dark Countess," while an imposter played her role on the political stage of Europe? Now, two hundred years later, using handwriting samples, DNA testing, and an undiscovered cache of Bourbon family letters, Nagel finally solves this mystery. She tells the remarkable story in full and draws a vivid portrait of an astonishing woman who both defined and shaped an era. Marie-Thérèse's deliberate choice of husbands determined the map of nineteenth-century Europe. Even Napoleon was in awe and called her "the only man in the family." Nagel's gripping narrative captures the events of her fascinating life from her very public birth in front of the rowdy crowds and her precocious childhood to her hideous time in prison and her later reincarnation in the public eye as a saint, and, above all, her fierce loyalty to France throughout.

    This text turns aside from the official portraits and great historical events to rediscover the private places and objects that reflect Marie Antoinettes personality and reveal her more directly to our modern gaze.

    It combines his detailed, accurate and compelling illustrations of scenes recorded as they actually happened with his vivid and gripping memoirs of the campaign. The result is a superb and remarkably detailed evocation of 1812, from the sweeping battle scenes which capture the ordeal of Smolensk and Borodino, to the day-to-day struggle to keep campfires burning and famished men fed. Faber du Faur's plates - admired and highly-regarded primary source material - are here presented, for the first time, complete and in full color. His moving and frank memoirs, edited and translated by Jonathan North, are accompanied by a detailed campaign history and biography of the artist. Napoleon's invasion of Russia is a legendary campaign and a captivating story of endurance, survival and the rigors of total war. Few of the 500,000 men to cross the Niemen in July 1812 were to survive - the French army was decimated by the advance into the heart of Russia, and almost completely destroyed in the epic retreat from Moscow. With Napoleon in Russia is a unique presentation of this epic and an unforgettable depiction of the horrors of war.

    Conan-Doyle based his famous Brigadier Gerard on Marbot and that fictional cavalryman's character shines through on these pages. Marbot's expansive recollections begin here as a young Hussar with a 'painted' moustache and sweeps the reader through the very pages of history, encounters with Napoleon and graphically related battlefield experiences - engagingly told by a soldier with a 'good stock of courage' - if he says so himself."

    The fulfilment of ambition of his career is all but realised just in time for his involvement in Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Russia and the harrowing retreat from Moscow. We experience through Marbots words and the campaigns that follow the events which brought about the fall of Napoleon. Marbots memoirs have been available to readers in a heavily edited form but this volume enables everyone to enjoy its principal character's personal experiences to the full. All are worth reading and Marbot's penmanship never fails to carry his reader excitingly through them."