Andrew Roberts

After seizing power in a coup d’état, Napoleon Bonaparte ended the corruption and incompetence into which the Revolution had descended. In a series of dazzling battles he reinvented the art of warfare; in peace, he completely remade the laws of France, modernised her systems of education and administration, and presided over a flourishing of the beautiful Empire Style in the arts. The impossibility of defeating his most persistent enemy, Great Britain, led him to make draining and ultimately fatal expeditions into Spain and Russia, where half a million Frenchmen died and his Empire began to unravel. 2015 marks the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo. Chaired by Geordie Greig, editor of The Mail on Sunday.