“ AFTER all, let them condense, suppress, and mutilate as they please, it will prove very troublesome to make me disappear altogether.” Yet on first glancing at the brave frame in which the Century ...

Mr. Mazower is a professor of history at Columbia. “History,” the essayist Thomas Carlyle wrote in 1840, “is the biography of great men” — and of these Napoleon, whom Carlyle described as “our chief ...