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In this interview, Ruth Scurr told me about Napoleon’s double relationship with the gardens. On the one hand Napoleon was interested in botany and gardens satisfied his inherent scientific curiosity. On the the other hand, however, Napoleon viewed gardens as a space for reflection, contemplation and where he could have deep philosophical conversations.
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In this interview, Ruth Scurr told me about Napoleon’s double relationship with the gardens. On the one hand Napoleon was interested in botany and gardens satisfied his inherent scientific curiosity. On the the other hand, however, Napoleon viewed gardens as a space for reflection, contemplation and where he could have deep philosophical conversations.
Listen to Napoleon and His Gardens - Dr. Ruth Scurr by Vashik Armenikus MP3 song. Napoleon and His Gardens - Dr. Ruth Scurr song from Vashik Armenikus is available on Audio.com. The duration of song is 49:29. This high-quality MP3 track has 260.438 kbps bitrate and was uploaded on 7 Jun 2023. Stream and download Napoleon and His Gardens - Dr. Ruth Scurr by Vashik Armenikus for free on Audio.com – your ultimate destination for MP3 music.
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And I kept coming back to the image that ended up being used on the cover of the book of him leaning on the spade in exile in his last garden, where he swapped the famous beecorn hat for which he'd become so famous for the straw hat. And this man who had acquired such a huge influence, such a huge empire, is left with almost nothing right at the end of his life. He did genuinely believe that if he hadn't had to become a military genius and devote himself to life as a soldier, that he would have been a scientist and that he would have been making a massive contribution. In one respect, caring about the garden on St. Helena was a continuation of a way of coping with being in exile, but it was more than that. He was also very psychologically bothered about being surveyed by the British guards. So two things came together with the extensive gardening project that he had. One was that it would give him some exercise. It would also help him hide from the guards. Hello everyone, welcome to Artidote podcast, where I interview non-fiction authors about their timeless books and ideas. My name is Vasek Armanikos and my guest today is Dr. Ruth Skerr, who is an academic at the University of Cambridge and author of a brilliant new biography of Napoleon called Napoleon A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows. One of the reviewers of this book said that, more books have been written about Napoleon than there have been days since his death in May 1821. Now Ruth Skerr has ingenuously somehow found an entirely new prism through which to view Napoleon, a gardener. In this interview, Dr. Ruth Skerr told me about Napoleon's double relationship with gardens. On the one hand, Napoleon was interested in botany and gardens satisfied his inherent scientific curiosity. On the other hand, however, Napoleon viewed gardens as a space for reflection, contemplation and where he could have deep philosophical conversations. Thank you for joining Artidote podcast and I hope you will enjoy listening to my interview with Dr. Ruth Skerr. Dr. Skerr, thank you so much for coming to my podcast. You have such a lovely book on Napoleon. I enjoyed reading it so much and I shared it with my readers of my newsletter. I received so many emails saying about, first of all, how wonderfully it's written and second that it is a kind of a very fresh angle on Napoleon's life. For those of my audience, of my readers who are not familiar with you, could you tell a little bit about yourself, about your research? Sure. So, I'm an academic in Cambridge. I'm at Gomberlinke Youth College and I specialize in the history of political thought, sort of 1700 to 1890. I'm also very interested in the theory of the modern state and so I have lots of historical interests. But alongside that, I've always been fascinated by biography and by the ways in which it's possible to be creative within the genre, because sometimes biography has a pretty negative reputation. They're sort of traditional cradle to grave, great big tombs of work, also claimed to be definitive. So, the idea that as a biographer, you have to sort of displace the other people who came before you and you have to make grand claims for this being the definitive picture of the life. And all of that I find extremely unattractive and I'm very opposed to the idea that any single biographer could possibly capture everything that's important in another person's life. And I believe that as a biographer, I bring a lot of myself to the task of writing about someone else's life. So, actually, it's a relationship between the two of us. So, that's my background. I've now written three biographies and they're very, very, very different and I can talk to you a little bit about that if you think your listeners would be interested. Yes, of course, towards the end of the interview, I would like to ask you to tell a little bit more about them. What makes your book on Napoleon to stand out, that it looks through a completely different angle of his personality, which was a very broad personality. I was curious, how did you notice that kind of a missing gap that wasn't explored in Napoleon's life? How did you stumble upon it? So, it's a fantastic question and the starting point is actually in the shadows. So, in my subtitle, I have a life in gardens and shadows and my first idea was to try and write about Napoleon from the perspective of the other people gathered around his life over whom his shadow fell. So, it would be the opposite of saying, this guy was the sun and this guy was the center of the universe and he's a great big powerful man and therefore we have to keep writing about him. The approach was going to be to assemble around him lots of much less well-known lives and in some cases, really quite obscure lives over whom his influence fell and to almost create a negative biography of him so he would emerge from those other lives but the focus would be more on them than on him. So, that was the original idea and then it became very, very difficult to execute because there are so many thousands of lives over whom he has had an influence and it was really difficult to choose who you were going to include, who you were going to focus on. I was really, really struggling to narrow it down to the cast list that I needed. So, then I went back to thinking about what images of Napoleon had always really, really stayed in my mind, why I wanted to write about Napoleon in the first place and I kept coming back to the image that ended up being used on the cover of the book of him leaning on the spade in exile in his last garden where he swapped the famous beacon hat for which he's become so famous for the straw hat and this man he had acquired such a huge influence, such a huge empire is left with almost nothing right at the end of his life. And then I went back to the beginning of the story and I started noticing gardens, garden at school, Mowbray nursery on Corsica, his love for the botanical garden in the centre of Paris and I went through the whole story and started looking for more gardens and they were just there, they just came, it was sort of magical for me to find that and around the gardens I was able to use those spaces as my principle of including other people so I could include the other people he'd met in the gardens, who'd helped create the gardens, his architects, artists, people who actually were involved in those gardens which went from being very, very small at the beginning, I mean almost, you know, we have very fragile evidence for this first garden at school and it gets stronger and stronger and as his power rises, the gardens rise in magnitude and splendour until they start falling off and that's a very fascinating time when his power is declining and the plans that he had for a grand garden right at the centre of Paris have to be revised down until they end up being a garden pavilion on the banks of the Seine so that was how it was, it was definitely something I discovered in the process of writing rather than having a very clear idea right at the beginning what I was going to be doing. It's fascinating, you start your biography with the quote by Paul Valéry where I won't be able to cite it word by word but for our listeners Paul Valéry said that if only Napoleon focused his energy on something like science, gardening etc. I wanted to ask you if you can tell where do you think this source of fascination of gardens being important in his life, in your opinion, came to the life of Napoleon? He could have become a scientist, equally a scientist and I guess that's what fascinated me in your biography that you know this personality about whom I've written so many books already and there is this part of his life that hasn't been explored. It's a combination of what you actually just mentioned there when you were talking, a very serious scientific interest that he has throughout his life. He did genuinely believe that if he hadn't had to become a military genius and devote himself to life as a soldier that he would have been a scientist and that he would have been making a massive contribution. I mean obviously he's not a self-effacing person so he immediately thinks that he might have been comparing himself with Newton or if he had chosen this path. Goodness only knows what the truth is but what is clear is that he is really interested in science and scientists and supportive of them throughout his life but only if they don't clash with his political views. So there comes a point where he will prioritise politics especially religious politics when he's starting to try and build a rapprochement with the Pope. He doesn't want the scientists disrupting that with their views and causing trouble. So there's one quote where he says to them, don't mess with my bible, this is not the time. I don't want to have these kinds of debates opening up. He never hesitates to censor if he thinks that's in the political interests of the regime that he's trying to stabilise and yet there is I think a really genuine interest in trying to develop science and scientific understanding and we see that in a whole variety of contexts. So I think that's a very big part of the interest in gardening, in botany, in propagating plants, in understanding what's possible. But there's also just a very human love of green spaces, the relaxation that comes from being outside, being able to walk and reflect on important decisions and feeling, I think I kind of draw a contrast that this is someone who's almost always in motion and in a hurry and he's very often at war. So when we see him in those green spaces, there are unusual opportunities to see what he's like in more restful moments or more reflective moments actually. So there are like the gardens serve two purposes here. One is like his interest in botany and trying to build, to bring all the exotic things to France, but at the same time, places for reflection. Yeah, definitely. And there's also an aesthetic side to it. I mean, he likes the traditional French classical style of gardening. He likes straight lines. He likes avenues of trees. He likes topery. He likes order imposed on nature. And he gets into conflict with his first wife, Josephine, who has a very different aesthetic. She likes romantic vistas. She likes winding paths, picturesque views in her garden. And they definitely clash there. And you can see in that as a very, very human dispute that many couples would have over their taste in their garden or in their house. It's very interesting, the aesthetic, the kind of reflective and his scientific curiosity in gardens. When he was just starting, let's say he was a young officer, were his interests in gardening more focused on the scientific part? And then once he became the emperor and he could afford the aesthetic reflective pleasures, how did it change in his life, this balance between these three factors? So you're exactly right. I mean, as a young soldier, what he really loves is the botanical garden at the centre of Paris. And the amazing way in which it has survived the revolution. So it was one of the very few royalists in institutions that actually managed to remake itself and survive. And it provided the green space and the space of scientific inquiry right at the centre of Paris, even during the terror, which is quite extraordinary. And he really loved to go there. He loved to see the new animals that came to the menagerie there. He loved the greenhouses there. So it's very scientific, and certainly he isn't at that stage in his life actively participating in gardening. So then as his power and influence develop when he goes to Egypt, for example, he wants to establish a similar botanical garden in Egypt as part of the Travelling Institute, as part of all those scholars and scientists that he's brought with him to Egypt. And he wants his own garden in Egypt to have certain French features grafted onto it. So he's irritated there aren't enough alleys and walkways, because that's one of the major purposes for the garden, as he understands it. So he starts to graft them into his garden that he had in Cairo. And after that, the gardens become even grander. I mean, there's this hope that there can be a huge garden right at the centre of Paris, which will really sort of be parallel and replicate the possible garden at the centre of Rome that he was planning. These huge, huge gardens to incorporate the ancient monuments in Rome, and he's going to have a parallel one in Paris, etc. But I think he only starts actually personally gardening, apart from the odd little bit at Malmaison, his house with Josephine, where there's occasional reports of people going to visit him there, and he's overseeing some more watering of beds or something. But I think the real active involvement comes in exile. So it comes almost as a solace, as an activity that comes into his life, when he has already started to lose power. And it's a way, I think, of continuing to impose order on his environment. But obviously, that shrinks down smaller and smaller. The first exile on Elba, he has a considerable garden there, and he has quite a lot of money and he's able to make big changes there. But once you get to the final exile on St. Helena, he's really struggling to even get, you know, minimal plants to grow in a very, very hostile environment. So it's very, it's very interesting to see his character shift through that whole arc of grandeur and then decline. You mentioned his campaign to Egypt that he had. His expedition, as you mentioned, consists of many scholars and different scientists who travelled there. I was wondering what he was trying, was this balance between importing and exporting? What was he trying to bring to Egypt, let's say, in contrast to France? How do they differ, like these different personality traits of him? So this is one of the things that's very important to me, is to be able to capture the very different ways in which we can assess him and not to have to choose, you know, was he simply an exploitative conqueror or was he an enlightenment figure? You know, in many respects, both are true. He was in Egypt to pursue France's commercial interests. He behaves with excessive brutality on many occasions. He doesn't hesitate to knock down buildings, trees, anything that is in his way in what he perceives to be the French interest in Egypt. So it's brutal, it's oppressive. But it's also true that he takes the scientists and scholars with him to try to collate information about the history of the country, about the practices of agriculture, about the animals, the flora, the fauna, and end up producing this incredible description of Egypt with beautiful drawings and really important data collected in a very systematic manner. So it's a mixed picture. You know, on the one hand, you want to say, well, this is a barbaric enterprise. He, on occasion, shows very little regard for what he finds in Cairo. And on the other hand, he is definitely a highly, highly educated person who really values history, literature, and scientific knowledge, and does a lot to collect that at that time. So it's very important, I think, to be able to accept and acknowledge both sides of that story. I hope you enjoy listening to my interview with Dr. Ruth Skerr. Before we continue, I would like to mention that you can receive all of my book recommendations straight to your inbox by subscribing to my newsletter. I'll leave a link to it in the description of this episode. I would also like to thank all of you who replied to my previous edition of my newsletter and sent all of your wonderful questions for this interview. If you are not a subscriber yet, as I mentioned, you can join and send your questions to the future guests by following the link that I'll leave in the description. Thank you for listening once again, and let's continue with the rest of the episode. Were there practices in gardening in Egypt that he particularly liked? Were there, like, practices in, let's say, in Egypt, in the culture there that he admired and wanted to bring back to France, or the other way around? So it's mostly the other way around. So the attitude he has and that the scholars have is one of implicit superiority. They assume that what they find is less evolved, less developed, in agricultural practice than what they have been used to in Europe. So he, for example, describes what one of his scientists describes in the description of Egypt. Actually, yes, there are important gardens in Cairo, but they're not gardens in the European sense. These are more like plantations. The French think that they have been designed to be viewed from above, from a sedentary position in a kiosk, or from a terrace, rather than walked in and enjoyed. So they keep on drawing this contrast between whether you value a garden as a place to walk in and to exercise in and to reflect in, or whether you want it to basically be visible from inside. And so a backdrop to your house or your palace, or whatever. So there's that contrast. But also, he's very, in some respects, they're very quick to describe as their own achievements, achievements that already existed before they got there. So with the Institute's botanical garden, very quickly, they're really proud of what they have achieved. They say this garden on the banks of the Nile is going to rival the one in Paris, it could become the most beautiful garden in the world. But they don't emphasize that actually, it was already a botanical garden before they got there. They may have brought some improvements, they may have altered things more to their taste, they may have built upon something, but it actually existed there before they got there. And that's very interesting, I think, this kind of willingness to simply begin the history, begin the story of a garden with their arrival, when it patently was not the case. I assume this idea also comes from the French Revolution itself that tried to count everything from the start. That's a very good point. So these are all revolutionary generation people. Napoleon lived through that, the sense of, you know, beginning again, restarting the story of history, of civilization, etc. I mean, I write a bit in my book about the revolutionary calendar, and Napoleon actually ends up cancelling that experiment. It's so interesting. I want, sorry for interrupting, I wanted to mention that, yes, you in your book, you mentioned all the dates in parallel with the revolutionary calendar. Was that the purpose? Yes, it was. So it's quite cumbersome. So it takes up quite a lot of space if you're going to give the date in the old Gregorian style and the revolutionary calendar style. But I really wanted that because I wanted people to just keep confronting the strangeness of that period of time where even the days and the months are redescribed. So given these new names, there's a new decimal system for calculating the passage of time. And it's so extraordinary that that could have been invented, introduced, and then cancelled again within that short space of time. And also, lots of the botanists and gardeners that Napoleon knew from the botanical garden in Paris, they're involved in it. They are thinking up the names of the new days, giving advice on how to formulate the calendar, etc. So it's one of the crossover points between exactly what you said, the revolutionary spirit, and then the way Napoleon, even though he has come through the revolution, even though he has been an enthusiastic revolutionary, starts to close it down. And for many of the friends of his who were a revolutionary Republican in their feelings and commitments, they really could not forgive this betrayal of the revolutionary dreams as they saw it. It is phenomenal to think that all the days, all the years can be counted completely differently from scratch. It's very difficult to fully understand it. It is, but it's also very magical. I follow the revolutionary calendar on Twitter, so I often know which day we're in. We're in watering can day, or today is the day of the fig, or whatever. And it's such a beautiful construct that they had. Obviously, what's important there is completely secular. That was part of the point. This is going to be the natural world. This is going to be mankind sort of charting time and the passage of the years through a natural framework rather than a religious one. You mentioned several times in your book that certain gardens were designed as if the man imposing its will on nature, particularly, if I'm not mistaken, in Chardin's Des Plantes. This idea of humans imposing their will on nature, it also comes from the revolution. And how did it change in the mind of Napoleon over his life, you know, this imposing? So I think for me, with the particular case of Napoleon, there's this parallel contrast between the garden and the battlefield. So they're both spaces within which there is a strategy where the terrain and the weather and all of those natural features matter in terms of what you're trying to achieve. And he, on the battlefield, was incredibly detailed in his understanding of what kind of light and what kind of effect the visibility is going to have, how to understand the presence of a river running through the space, etc. And I think that for me, there is a parallel with the kinds of planning and strategy in gardens. But obviously, one is creative and one is destructive. So there's a huge contrast there. And I also talk about the two times in his life where that contrast broke down and end up with a very vicious battle in a garden. And that is, you know, one of the framing ideas of the book, really, is that sort of right at the beginning, right at the end, that distinction between the creative and the destructive was threatened when suddenly you had a very vicious battle occurring in what had been a formal and very structured and controlled space. One of them is in Waterloo, and the other one is in a French name that I find very difficult to pronounce. One is in the beginning of his life, and the other one is the Waterloo towards the end. And what is the contrast between the two? Did it change his perception of the garden? Did it change when he encountered them in a military combat? Yes. So the first one is really dramatic because it's the fall of the monarchy. It's basically when it becomes clear that the monarchy is going to completely stop and there's going to be a republic. So the king basically gives up his power. And the reason there's a battle is because he instructs his bodyguard, his Swiss guard, to lay down their arms, return to their barracks, not to fire on the people. But the people have already broken into this enclosed garden, and they take their revenge on these soldiers, this Swiss guard. And then there is a massacre, effectively, sort of 700 or so of these corpses piling up around the formal garden, with the formal pond, the beautiful statues. And incredibly, Napoleon was there as Bonaparte, before he was known as Napoleon, as the young revolutionary soldier Bonaparte. He sees the battle, and he always remembers it as having had the most profound effect upon him. Because he's not sure, is it like the first time he's seen bloodshed very close at hand? Is it because of the contrast between the beautiful garden and this appalling massacre? Is it the space? Is it that he's still young? But for whatever reason, it really stays with him. And later in his life, he tells his brother, you know, I was never so disturbed by bloodshed as I was on that day. So that's the first one. And for me, obviously, you know, it's a very, very rich way of capturing the regime change that is at the center of this story. Because without the revolution, without the fall of the monarchy, there would be no Napoleon. He wouldn't have had the opportunities that he had. They're all revolutionary opportunities. And so it's a very, very dramatic framing of that huge historical shift, but in a very particular place. Waterloo is completely different, because what happened there is that there was a walled garden as part of a chateau that was on the side of the battlefield. And before the fighting started, Wellington had become very determined to hold on to that chateau as a stronghold on the side of the battlefield. And the French soldiers had repeated attempts to take it and they lost many, many, many lives trying to do so. And on several occasions managed to break through the gates and have this sort of fighting in the garden, which had been a formal garden, also in the orchard beyond that. So Napoleon himself wasn't in the garden at Waterloo, but the fight that happened there, obviously, completely ended his power. And the fact that there was this garden, and there was a very determined conflict over it, and that Wellington had been so determined to hold on to it, that then entered into the stories of Waterloo afterwards. And so we find it being picked up by, for example, Victor Hugo, when he writes his novel, he goes there, and he thinks he goes around the garden counting the bullet holes and looking at all the trees that have been destroyed, etc. So it's very evocative of that final defeat for Napoleon. I was wondering, when you were looking at his life, were there things that you were really surprised? Did your opinion of Napoleon change? So one of the things I've been most proud of about my book is that people who really, really passionately admire Napoleon, and also people who actively dislike him and will do anything to lower his reputation, all of them have been accepting of my book and have been a bit unclear as to which side I'm on. Like, do I like him? Do I not like him? And they ask me sometimes, they're like, but you like him, right? You're on our side. Or they say, but obviously, you agree, this was a terrible person. I actually, I don't have a commitment on either side. For me, you know, it's about making him real on the page, trying to evoke him, rather than my personal judgment as to whether or not this is a good or a bad person. I mean, I'm not very interested in that. I'm interested in many, many layers, and many, many different ways to approach him. So when people say, well, you know, I read your book, and it just absolutely confirms what a terrible man you think you are, that's fine. And when other people say, you know, I've always loved Napoleon, and I read your book, now I like him even more. That's also fine by me, because I don't feel strongly committed in trying to decide, you know, is he a goody or is he a baddy? Yeah, no, of course, the person who is looking for confirmation of their beliefs will always find it everywhere. What about the layers about his, I don't know, character, curiosity, in terms of like, personality traits that kind of go beyond good and evil? So the one thing that's very clear is this obsessive attention to detail. He has got the most extraordinary capacity to keep on top of the finer details of the smallest, you know, interior design project that is going on alongside all the other questions of state. So he can do diplomacy, he can do battle planning, he can do all sorts of things that he will also notice if the architect put the window in the wrong place, he is completely on it. He will go through the account books, and he will see that the gardener has been overspending, he will look at what the gardener has spent, and he'll be like, why didn't we use grass seed instead of using, why did you get this expensive turf when we could have used grass seed, and that would have been or even a fraction of the cost. So the bandwidth of his mind for all manner of tiny details is really, really extraordinary, and he's just missing absolutely nothing. Yeah, it is. It is phenomenal when you read about such a broad personality and to see this extraordinary talent and unique skills that he had. He admired certain thinkers, certain architects, but he wasn't hesitant to point out their mistakes as well. You mentioned, I think, the case of Lamarck, that he humiliated him in some sense. How did he gauge how intelligent he is in comparison to other thinkers? Was it sometimes sheer arrogance or it was like genuinely he could notice those details? Yeah, it's both. So with the Lamarck example, he was negatively influenced against Lamarck by other scientists that he trusted and basically was prejudiced against him, didn't take the trouble to really understand Lamarck's work, thought at some level it might be threatening to his intentions with the church. And so he was very, very dismissive. And that's an example of him being influenced by the court around him. I mean, like any reigning figure, like any monarch, he will take his guidance on occasions from the courtiers. And he will, as a result, when we look back with hindsight, will look as though he was narrow-minded and prejudiced. But on other occasions, he is completely right. I mean, he will spot, for example, when Canova sent across the giant statue of Napoleon that Napoleon was always a bit nervous about because he didn't really want it to be nude. He was like, well, can I just be in my battle clothes? I mean, my costume, why has it got to be nude? And Canova was like, no, no, this is the sublime. This is how we do it. This is the cult sculpture. And we finally arrive and Napoleon is kind of a bit embarrassed by it for a start. It's a big contrast with the reality of his physique and what has been portrayed by the sculptor. But he also spots a problem with the elbow joint. And if you look closely at it, you think, well, actually, yeah, I see what he means there. Maybe something has gone wrong with the elbow joint. Must be, Canova must have been so annoyed. He must have been so annoyed when you judge, when someone judges your work so much. Absolutely. It's quite interesting with that statue that when they were shipping it, they were told if the English capture the boat, chuck it overboard because we don't want that statue captured and taken to England. But that is exactly where it is. It's in Wellington's house in London. And, you know, extraordinary that it ended up there. Ironic. And his last garden when he was in exile, I was wondering what was his project in terms of garden on that island? What was his thought process? How did that arc end in his life? So, in one way, it's the development of what had happened on Elba. He was on Elba for a much shorter time for the first exile. And he had invested time and money in the gardens of the houses that he lived in on Elba and befriended the gardener there. So, in one respect, caring about the garden on St Helena was a continuation of a way of coping with being in exile. But it was more than that, because he became unwell and he was also very psychologically bothered about being surveyed by the British guards. And so, two things came together with the extensive gardening projects that he had. One was that it would give him some exercise without him having to leave the confines of his own home. And it would also help him hide from the guards because he would construct these sunken paths and these tall trellises of plants. And that would be an obstacle to their ability to see what he was doing and to intrude on his privacy in exile. So, his hit upon this idea was suggested to him by his doctor. And he becomes incredibly energetic about it. It gets the whole household involved in it. They're all going to be growing vegetables. They're going to be living off the vegetables, etc. Great, big, grandiose plants for moving trees around, organizing a sort of grotto as part of this, constructing the wall, etc. But it's all an incredibly hostile environment and very, very difficult for the plants to thrive, very hard to water them. And also there's a lot of damp and mold and very, very, very difficult. So, however hard they try, they're constantly up against a really, really hostile, natural world that is really hard to control. To come back about what you mentioned in the beginning about your other books, how was this book different from them? Yeah, so my first book was about Robespierre and the French Revolution. So, that really was a book about the revolutionary events that I was describing Napoleon as the young Bonaparte would have witnessed the fall of the monarchy. And so, in some ways, going back to that story and picking up with Napoleon and his story was a continuation for me from the interest I had in the revolution and trying to find a way to see how that revolutionary project ended in the reign of Napoleon and in the things that he prioritized over the republic, over the revolution. So, in that sense, my first and my third book are close in subject matter and time, but they're so different in atmosphere and in approach. And I think part of that reason is because in between the two of them, I wrote my second book, which was totally different. That was a book about a very early biographer, 17th century biographer, John Aubrey, who was recovering from the English Civil War and who collected all the information he could about his contemporaries. So, I wrote an imagined diary for him whereby his life was at the center, even though he basically gave his life to being the biographer of those more famous people around him. And lots of what we know about Milton or William Harvey, writers, scientists, we know from him. So, I think writing that book, which was so different in approach and subject matter, really freed me to come back to the revolution, to come back to France, back to Napoleon and do something totally different from what I did the first time around. Is there any other future books that listeners should know about that you are working on right now? No. So, I always have a period where I'm very unsure what I'm doing, because for me, I need to find the way, I need to find the subject, I don't want to do a repeat. So, sometimes people ask me, like after my second book, they said, well, are you going to, if you do another book, will you also do an imagined diary for that person? And I was like, no, absolutely not. Somebody else might do that. I'm not doing that. And now they say, well, if you do another person, will you do their life to their gardens? And I'm like, no, absolutely not. So, I have to find my subject and then I have to find my method. And for me, it's a very creative process and I couldn't really engage with it or be excited about it if I thought it was basically repeating myself. And if my listeners would like to follow you, where would they do that? So, I do quite a lot on Twitter because I review a lot of books as well as writing mine. I'm quite active in looking at what's happening in the literary world and nonfiction as well as fiction I'm very interested in. So, I use Twitter because it allows you to retweet articles and texts and things. I have a lot of friends who do Instagram, but I find that too focused on image. It's too visual for me. I like words. So, I like to be able to have that sense of the text that you can have on Twitter. And I have my website as well, which I try to keep up to date with putting my reviews on. Thank you so much, Dr. Skara. It was such a pleasure to talk with you. I wish you all good luck with the future projects. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode. Dr. Ruth Skara's biography of Napoleon is one of my favorite reads of 2021. You can find all the details of this episode, including other books by Dr. Ruth Skara on my website, which will be linked in the description of this episode. I would be excited to meet you and hear your book recommendations via my monthly newsletter, which also will be linked in the description. Thanks once again, and I will see you in the next episode of Art Skill Podcast.
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