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contributors Michael Arditti’s latest novel, The Anointed, will be out in paperback from Arcadia in May. Miriam Balanescu is a freelance writer whose work has been published in The Guardian, the New Statesman and elsewhere. Timothy Brook’s most recent book is Great State: China & the World (Profile, 2019). Helen Bynum writes about people, plants, health and disease from deep in the Suffolk countryside. Robert Colls’s This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England 1760–1960 was published by Oxford University Press last September. Peter Conrad’s The Mysteries of Cinema: Movies & Imagination is published by Thames & Hudson. Natasha Cooper, who also writes as N J Cooper, is a crime writer and critic. Andrew Crumey lectures at Northumbria University. His most recent book is The Great Chain of Unbeing. Howard Davies is chair of the Natwest Group and a former deputy governor of the Bank of England. Hermione Eyre is the author of Viper Wine, a novel, and a journalist formerly of The Independent and the Evening Standard. Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest book is Out of Our Minds. Jade Angeles Fitton writes about art and culture. Her writing has appeared in the New Statesman, The Independent, Vogue and the TLS, among others. Ian Fraser is the author of Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain. Keshava Guha is the author of the novel Accidental Magic. He lives in Delhi. Joanna Kavenna’s latest novel is Zed. Jonathan Keates is working on a biography of the composer Gaetano Donizetti. David Keenan’s fifth novel, Monument Maker, will be published by White Rabbit Books in June. Jake Kerridge is a freelance journalist and critic. H Kumarasingham is a historian of British politics and decolonisation at the University of Edinburgh. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, which will be published in 2022. Emma Larkin is the author of Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok, published by Granta Books in May. Lucy Lethbridge’s next book, Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves, will be published this year. Mathew Lyons is a freelance writer and historian. He is currently working on a book about the dissolution of the monasteries. Richard Overy’s latest book, Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931–1945, will be published in August. David Patrikarakos is the author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. John Phipps is a freelance writer. Lucy Popescu is the editor of the refugee anthologies A Country of Refuge and A Country to Call Home. Linda Porter’s latest book, Mistresses: Sex & Scandal at the Court of Charles II, is out in paperback in April. She is currently writing a biography of Margaret Tudor. Munro Price is Professor of International History at Bradford University. His most recent book is Napoleon: The End of Glory. Anna Reid is the author of Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine, The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, and Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege, 1941–44. She is currently writing a book on the Allied military intervention in the Russian Civil War. Steve Richards’s latest book is Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson. He presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster and a weekly podcast, Rock N Roll Politics. His next book, The Prime Ministers We Never Had, is coming out in September. Leo Robson is lead fiction reviewer for the New Statesman. Frances Spalding’s The Bloomsbury Group, published by the National Portrait Gallery, will be newly available in a refreshed format this month. N J Stallard is a writer and editor based in London. She was the winner of the Hollingworth Prize 2020. Guy Stevenson is a lecturer in English at Goldsmiths and Queen Mary, the University of London. He runs an online course at Goldsmiths on ‘Understanding the Culture Wars’, which is open to the general public and based on ideas from his book, Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture. Paul Theroux’s Under the Wave at Waimea is published this month by Hamish Hamilton. Gillian Tindall’s latest book, The Pulse Glass, about time and chance survival, is available now as a Virago paperback. Adrian Turpin is director of the Wigtown Festival. Salley Vickers was formerly a lecturer in English literature and a psychoanalyst. She now writes full time. Her latest novel, The Gardener, comes out in November (Viking). Sara Wheeler’s ten books include Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin & Other Geniuses of the Golden Age, published last year by Vintage. Will Wiles is the author of three novels, most recently Plume (Fourth Estate, 2019). Tom Williams is a freelance writer. James Womack’s most recent collection of poems, Homunculus, was published in 2020. Literary Review | april 2021 4
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history munro price telling detail but never loses sight of the broader picture, and uses his archival discoveries to excellent effect. The result is both an exciting narrative and a fine work of scholarship, shedding new light on Napoleonic history and that of the modern Catholic Church. In particular, he pinpoints Napoleon’s worst aspects: his obsession with domination, his complete inability to negotiate with equals rather than dictate to subordinates and his terrible temper. In January 1813, a rumour spread that, during a stormy interview at Fontainebleau, he had actually struck the pope. Rather generously, Pius himself later set the record straight, saying that Napoleon ‘never undertook such an excess against my person. However, one Bonaparte Meets His Match To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII By Ambrogio A Caiani (Yale University Press 359pp £20) This 5 May will mark the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death on St Helena. The occasion will no doubt be marked, as was the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo six years ago, by a flood of new books about the emperor, adding yet more to the estimated 200,000 already written. Given this saturation, one wonders if there is anything left to say. This fascinating book proves that there is. It does so by focusing on a crucial yet neglected aspect of Napoleon’s rule: his bitter, decade-long confrontation with Pope Pius VII. This marked an important step both in the emperor’s decline and fall, and in the evolution of the Catholic Church. clear, using significant, previously unexploited material in the Vatican Archives, Pius had seen this trial of strength coming and spent several months preparing for it. He ordered his bishops and priests not to cooperate with the invaders, embarked on a policy of passive resistance and finally excommunicated the emperor. In retaliation, Napoleon took the extraordinary step It is a dramatic story. Napoleon came to power determined to heal the most gaping wound left by the French Revolution, its schism with the Church, which for almost ten years had fuelled persecutions, peasant risings and civil war across large areas of France. As a partner in this task, he was lucky enough to find Barnaba Chiaramonti, recently elected as Pope Pius VII. The result of this collaboration was a remarkable achievement, the Concordat of 1801, which settled the respective limits of ecclesiastical and civil power in postrevolutionary France and outlived Napoleon by almost a century. The seal was set on the relationship three years later, when Pius travelled to Paris to officiate at Napoleon’s grandiose coronation in Notre-Dame as emperor of the French. Battle royal: Pius VII and Napoleon painted by José Frappa After this pinnacle, relations soured rapidly. With each military victory, Napoleon’s ego expanded. He became increasingly determined to twist the Concordat to subordinate the Church to the secular authorities, insisting on the ultimate right to nominate bishops in his empire, and began to annex outlying parts of the papal territories in central Italy. In February 1808, he sent his troops to occupy the Papal States. As Ambrogio Caiani makes of ordering the pope’s arrest and removal from Rome. On the night of 5 July 1809, this was carried out in a farcical operation involving collapsing ladders and soldiers blundering about in the dark, which Caiani recounts with verve. The pope was first placed under house arrest in Savona on the Ligurian coast, then in June 1812 transferred to the palace of Fontainebleau, south of Paris, where, courageously, he continued to resist Napoleon’s browbeating. He was only released when the French empire fell in the spring of 1814. Caiani relates this dramatic story in day in the heat of the moment … he grabbed me by one of the buttons of my cassock and shook me so strongly, by pulling it, that my entire body stirred. It is probably to this incident that most are referring.’ One might think that Pius was making a rather fine distinction. For historians, as for his more discerning contemporaries, Napoleon does not improve on closer acquaintance. However, the book’s real originality lies not in exposing Napoleon’s flaws but in bringing his neglected nemesis, Pius VII, out of the shadows. Sixty-seven at the time of his kidnapping, Pius was physically frail, but his unassuming exterior hid a core of steel. He had initially been open to reform of the Church, but Napoleon’s campaign of intimidation hardened his determination not to surrender any of his spiritual and temporal powers. The ordeals of his imprisonment make for painful reading. For long periods, this elderly man was kept in isolation, without even pen and paper. At other times, his captors constantly pressured him to submit to their master by feeding him exaggerated stories about the Church being in crisis with its head in captivity. In Savona, spyholes were drilled into the walls of his apartments, one directly above his bed, and on one occasion his bedroom was ransacked and his mattress torn to shreds in search of illicit correspondence. Small wonder that these measures took their toll: Pius had panic attacks and developed inflammation of the april 2021 | Literary Review 5

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contributors

Michael Arditti’s latest novel, The Anointed, will be out in paperback from Arcadia in May. Miriam Balanescu is a freelance writer whose work has been published in The Guardian, the New Statesman and elsewhere. Timothy Brook’s most recent book is Great State: China & the World (Profile, 2019). Helen Bynum writes about people, plants, health and disease from deep in the Suffolk countryside. Robert Colls’s This Sporting Life: Sport & Liberty in England 1760–1960 was published by Oxford University Press last September. Peter Conrad’s The Mysteries of Cinema: Movies & Imagination is published by Thames & Hudson. Natasha Cooper, who also writes as N J Cooper, is a crime writer and critic. Andrew Crumey lectures at Northumbria University. His most recent book is The Great Chain of Unbeing. Howard Davies is chair of the Natwest Group and a former deputy governor of the Bank of England. Hermione Eyre is the author of Viper Wine, a novel, and a journalist formerly of The Independent and the Evening Standard. Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s latest book is Out of Our Minds. Jade Angeles Fitton writes about art and culture. Her writing has appeared in the New Statesman, The Independent, Vogue and the TLS, among others. Ian Fraser is the author of Shredded: Inside RBS, The Bank That Broke Britain. Keshava Guha is the author of the novel Accidental Magic. He lives in Delhi. Joanna Kavenna’s latest novel is Zed. Jonathan Keates is working on a biography of the composer Gaetano Donizetti.

David Keenan’s fifth novel, Monument Maker, will be published by White Rabbit Books in June. Jake Kerridge is a freelance journalist and critic. H Kumarasingham is a historian of British politics and decolonisation at the University of Edinburgh. He is co-editor of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom, which will be published in 2022. Emma Larkin is the author of Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok, published by Granta Books in May. Lucy Lethbridge’s next book, Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves, will be published this year. Mathew Lyons is a freelance writer and historian. He is currently working on a book about the dissolution of the monasteries. Richard Overy’s latest book, Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War 1931–1945, will be published in August. David Patrikarakos is the author of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century. John Phipps is a freelance writer. Lucy Popescu is the editor of the refugee anthologies A Country of Refuge and A Country to Call Home. Linda Porter’s latest book, Mistresses: Sex & Scandal at the Court of Charles II, is out in paperback in April. She is currently writing a biography of Margaret Tudor. Munro Price is Professor of International History at Bradford University. His most recent book is Napoleon: The End of Glory.

Anna Reid is the author of Borderland: A Journey through the History of Ukraine, The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia, and Leningrad: Tragedy of a City under Siege, 1941–44. She is currently writing a book on the Allied military intervention in the Russian Civil War. Steve Richards’s latest book is Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to Johnson. He presents Radio 4’s Week in Westminster and a weekly podcast, Rock N Roll Politics. His next book, The Prime Ministers We Never Had, is coming out in September. Leo Robson is lead fiction reviewer for the New Statesman. Frances Spalding’s The Bloomsbury Group, published by the National Portrait Gallery, will be newly available in a refreshed format this month. N J Stallard is a writer and editor based in London. She was the winner of the Hollingworth Prize 2020. Guy Stevenson is a lecturer in English at Goldsmiths and Queen Mary, the University of London. He runs an online course at Goldsmiths on ‘Understanding the Culture Wars’, which is open to the general public and based on ideas from his book, Anti-Humanism in the Counterculture. Paul Theroux’s Under the Wave at Waimea is published this month by Hamish Hamilton. Gillian Tindall’s latest book, The Pulse Glass, about time and chance survival, is available now as a Virago paperback. Adrian Turpin is director of the Wigtown Festival. Salley Vickers was formerly a lecturer in English literature and a psychoanalyst. She now writes full time. Her latest novel, The Gardener, comes out in November (Viking). Sara Wheeler’s ten books include Mud and Stars: Travels in Russia with Pushkin & Other Geniuses of the Golden Age, published last year by Vintage. Will Wiles is the author of three novels, most recently Plume (Fourth Estate, 2019). Tom Williams is a freelance writer. James Womack’s most recent collection of poems, Homunculus, was published in 2020.

Literary Review | april 2021 4

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