Napoleon by Frank McLynn
Published 1997 · 744 pages · 294,000 words · about 20 hours at an average pace · Biography, History, Nonfiction
How hard is Napoleon to read?
Napoleon scores 46 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- McLynn writes a Latinate, Oxford-trained English studded with French terms left untranslated: déclassé, déraciné, cérébrale, condottiere, Déesse Raison. Psychoanalytic and philosophical words (voluntarism, sidereal familiars, warranted assertibility) sit beside military vocabulary for corps, columns and batteries. Harder than a popular biography such as Catherine the Great, lighter than Shelby Foote's Civil War.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Sentences run long and periodic, stacked with parentheses, semicolons and dashes, often weighing two historians' views in a single clause before delivering a verdict. The structures stay controlled and readable; paragraphs, not sentences, are what tire the reader.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Most pages narrate campaigns, marriages and intrigues in concrete detail. Every few chapters McLynn stops to theorise, setting the Romantic Napoleon against the Enlightenment one and reading the 'Oriental complex' and the Little Red Man through Jung and Freud, which lifts the book above straight chronicle.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Nearly 300,000 words carry a vast cast of marshals, ministers, siblings and mistresses, with dates, troop numbers and livres-to-pounds conversions on almost every page. With no footnotes and no pause for recaps, readers must track who betrayed whom across two decades and a dozen campaigns.
How Napoleon is regarded
Napoleon holds a literary regard score of 47 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.