Longing for Napoleon
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PARIS - It seems that not since Napoleon has France experienced such a cult of the personality. In any case, it is clear today that there is no other French politician who inspires such longings for that megalomaniacal
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The story begins with one of my buddies who survived basic going on to kill interesting people in interesting places. Most of my group managed to go from Texas to Korea to work on flight lines and for more training. Somewhere along the way, someone managed to wander far off the beaten path. He ended up in Morocco and found himself a beautiful woman to marry for a few years and spent most of his time being chased by the MPs. Take one part Indiana Jones, add a heaping spoonful of boring and a pinch of action, and you have military life abroad. The smell of shisha begins there, and it doesn't smell like the Air Force...
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An army marches on its stomach, declared Napoleon. According to VisitBritain, the authority on British tourism, so do tourists.
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On my way to Dior this afternoon to see John Galliano, my driver Bernard Alloux paused in the Place de la Concorde to point out a group of royalists gathered at the site where Louis XVI lost his head. Mr. Alloux said there were quite a few people in France who are royalists and then [...].
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For more than two thousand years the search for the real Alexander the Great has continued, with each generation seizing on some facet of his complex, contradictory character.
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In the early 1950s one of my childhood passions was stamp collecting. The shifting contours of the British Empire meant that old countries seemed to be constantly in a state of flux.
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An eagerly awaited new book tracing a  year in the life of Nicolas Sarkozy shows the French president  as a never-resting, power-hungry statesman with a weakness for  sweets and luxury watches.
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A love letter from Napoleon to his mistress Josephine sold for $557,000, more than five times its estimate, at a London auction that attracted spirited bidding for several rare items.
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King Louis XIV, known as le Roi Soleil, or Napoleon Bonaparte? Jean Daniel replied to this question in Le Nouvel Observateur, drawing readers attention to the fact that there is no longer any place for the ...
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Two centuries ago, Napoleon Bonaparte sent his armies into Spain to overthrow a monarch who had once been a French ally. Napoleon, who believed he was touched by the hand of destiny, predicted his troops would be welcomed as liberators by ordinary Spaniards. He was wrong. The resulting Peninsular...
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History smells if it doesn't exactly stink. In recent days, as the family is away in Pakistan, I have been amassing old books.
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Personal letters from people such as Napoleon and John Donne are being sold at auction.
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TOLCSVA, Hungary  - Louis XIV called it the "Wine  of Kings, King of Wines." Peter the Great was a fan. Rousseau  and Goethe both sang its praises.
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Mention of Napoleon arouses feelings of hatred among Spaniards born of loathing for a foreign invader who installed his brother Joseph on the Spanish throne.
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A love letter from Napoleon to his future wife, Josephine, is sold at auction in London for Â£276,000.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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Tycho:  If my earlier experiences with the co-operative campaign had not endured so, there would be no question - fifteen dollars is quite simply not a value that men of reason would associate with the GRAW Map Pack.  But, drawing on that idea, let us move forward as though the powerful fraternal bonds forged in Campaign One were sufficient to assuage price related suffering to some degree.  I realize that this moves our narrative into the realm of fiction.