At the end of his book Napoleon and his Marshals the late A. G. Macdonell wrote these words. ‘I am profoundly suspicious of almost all bibliographies. Nothing is easier than to hire someone to visit the British Museum and make a most impressive list of authorities, which will persuade the non-suspecting that the author is a monument of erudition and laboriousness.’ This I hold to be great truth.
In the half-century or more that I have interested myself in the subject I have read, or at least dipped into, more books than I can begin to remember. The loci classici are so well known that it would verge on insult to any possible reader of this to affect that he might be unaware of them. To continue my borrowing, ‘I propose, therefore, to confine myself to the simple statement that every single detail of this book has been taken from one or other work of history, reference, reminiscence, or biography.’ Where unpublished papers have been ravaged I have set out details in the Source Notes.