The book begins with the story of how Napoleon Bonaparte found himself in the house of Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu and governor of Odessa, in 1807. A brief liaison with the duke’s 19-year-old Italian servant girl, Luisa Ravelli, resulted in the birth of a son. The bombing of Odessa by an Anglo-French squadron in 1854 and the landing of French troops in Odessa in 1918 had the objective of finding that illegitimate son.The protagonist of the book, Yevgeny Rivilis, is Bonaparte’s great-great-grandson and a Russian emigre who landed in New York in August 1996. His personal drama is compounded by the fact that his ex-wife, Sophia, from whom he is not formally divorced, proves to be the mistress of one of the terrorist leaders... This fact explains the additional interest that the security services have in him...Part two of the book recounts the cooperation and opposition between the FBI and the FSB, one of the successors to the KGB. The security services’ clandestine operations culminate in murders. Both sides suffer losses. An FBI agent and an FSB agent operating under diplomatic cover are victims of the secret war in New York. Sometime later two related murders occur: the killing in Moscow of Yuri Shchekochikhin, an opposition journalist and a member of the State Duma (July, 2003), and the slaying of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the vice-president of Ichkeria in Doha, Qatar (February, 2004). Both events are indirectly linked to Sophia.The story unfolds in New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Paris, Copenhagen, Baghdad and Damascus.

From Andrew Roberts, author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Storm of War, this is the definitive modern biography of Napoleon It has become all too common for Napoleon Bonaparte's biographers to approach him as a figure to be reviled, bent on world domination, practically a proto-Hitler. Here, after years of study extending even to visits paid to St Helena and 53 of Napoleon's 56 battlefields, Andrew Roberts has created a true portrait of the mind, the life, and the military and above all political genius of a fundamentally constructive ruler. This is the Napoleon, Roberts reminds us, whose peacetime activity produced countless indispensable civic innovations - and whose Napoleonic Code provided the blueprint for civil law systems still in use around the world today. It is one of the greatest lives in world history, which here has found its ideal biographer. The sheer enjoyment which this book will give anyone who loves history is enormous. Andrew Roberts is a biographer and historian of international renown whose books include Salisbury: Victorian Titan (winner, the Wolfson Prize for History); Masters and Commanders; and The Storm of War, which reached No. 2 on the Sunday Times bestseller list. Roberts is a Fellow of the Royal Societies of Literature and Arts. He appears regularly on British television and radio and writes for the Sunday Telegraph, Spectator, Literary Review, Mail on Sunday and Daily Telegraph.

Here is the first-ever celebration of all things—and all people—of Scottish descent. While relatively few in number, the Scots have certainly made their mark on the world: · More the seventy-five percent of all American presidents have had Scottish ancestors, although fewer than five percent of the American population is of Scottish descent. · Almost eleven percent of all the Nobel Prizes ever awarded have involved Scots and their descendants—even though fewer than one half percent of the people of the world can claim Scottish ancestry · At least five of the twelve astronauts who have walked on the moon were descended from Scots. Today there are almost 28 million people of Scottish ancestry in the world, over 12 million of whom reside in the United States, about 4 million in Canada, and about 5 million in Scotland. Scottish accomplishments throughout history in every field of endeavor—from science to the arts to politics and exploration—rival those of even the largest ethnic groups: · Scots have been significant in most of the major inventions of the past three centuries, including the steam engine, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, the computer, transistor, and the motion picture · People as diverse as Sir Isaac Newton, Charles de Gaulle, Katharine Hepburn, Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor, Immanuel Kant, Sir Laurence Olivier, Elvis Presley, Edvard Grieg, John D. Rockefeller, and Ty Cobb could claim Scottish ancestry · Warsaw, Madrid, La Paz, and Stockholm have all had mayors of Scottish Descent. The Mark of the Scots contains thousands of facts and is fully annotated. It is a comprehensive and readable book that deserves a place on the shelve of every genealogist, Scottish-American, and history buff.