the PR spinner, burnishing his image for pos-
terity. It is a convincing portrait of a many-
faceted man.
As a proud Pole, Zamoyski is particu-
larly good on Napoleon’s relations with that
unhappy country, especially on his liaison
with the beautiful Maria Walewska, a rela-
tionship which she entered into for purely
patriotic purposes to advance the cause of
her native land. He has been well served
by his publishers, who have furnished a
range of unfamiliar illustrations, along with
maps of the major battles.
The spell that Napoleon continues to
exert is attested to in Mark Braude’s detailed
study of his exile on Elba, the tiny island
where he was sent after his first abdication
in 1814. With his customary energy, the fall-
en emperor put in train public works in this
miniature empire, transforming the island,
before attempting the last gamble in a life
of such daring ventures: his return to France.
Braude and Zamoyski agree that this
coda to his career was forced on Napoleon
by the Allies, who were already planning to
send the fallen eagle to St Helena to keep
him out of the way for good. Waterloo and
Wellington put paid to any chance of a sec-
ond coming for one of the most remarkable
people to have trod the earth.
The last miserable years in the South
Atlantic when, harassed by the pettifogging
persecution of his British jailer, Sir Hud-
son Lowe, Napoleon expired in a miasma of
boredom and recriminations, were an anti-
climax; but at least Britain let Boney live.
Considering the fates of his latterday emula-
tors Hitler and Mussolini, Napoleon’s fabled
luck endured to the end.
Beyond SAD
Juliet Nicolson
The Light in the Dark:
A Winter Journal
by Horatio Clare
Elliott & Thompson, £12.99, pp. 208As travel writer, nature writer, memory
retriever and, I would add, prose-poet of
mesmerising lyricism, Horatio Clare is
a celebrant and observer of what is love-
ly, less lovely and sometimes, thankfully,
absurd in the world.
But Clare has come to fear winter.
Recently the season has sapped his emo-
tional and creative energy, masking his
joy in living things, rarely in mankind but
in everything that might alert him to the
vibrancy and beauty of a wintry country-
side. He has not always felt this way, but
over the past few years, life in the north of
England — amid the increasing absence
of light, the claustrophobia of the York-
shire moors and the relentless black rain
that ‘makes you feel as if you are living
in a tunnel under the sea’ — has led him
to wrestle with something more challeng-
ing than persistent seasonal affective dis-
order. For a while now Clare has suffered
from an engulfing depression that dom-
inates almost every day of the coldest,
darkest months of the year.
Writing this winter journal has become
his ‘refuge’. At times expansive, at others
paring the language back as if in winter-
speak, some of Clare’s daily entries are
just a sentence or two long as he tracks
the incremental shifts from summer heat
and the fading light of autumn to the
inevitability of the cold, short winter days,
‘grey as glumness’. This coming season,
however, will be different, as Clare pledg-
es to ‘embrace this winter like a sum-
mer’. The result is an enthralling book of
beauty and pain, tenderness and imagina-
tive absorption.
Clare cannot choose to hibernate dur-
ing the winter months. He is a professor of
creative writing at John Moores Univer-
sity in Liverpool, to which he commutes
from Yorkshire by train several times
a week, energising, reassuring and inspir-
ing his students. Occasionally when his
train home is cancelled due to the harsh-
ness of the weather he spends the night
in a frighteningly awful Edwardian hotel
that serves fish ‘you could club a cat with’.
At home he also has responsibilities, liv-
ing with the ‘life-changer, life-enhancer’
Rebecca and the two sons aged five and
16 that they share between them.
Despite the temptation to withdraw,
there are other people with whom he must
engage. There are neighbours, friends and
his gutsy, stalwart, sheep-farming mother
who still manages the Welsh farm whereClare grew up, a childhood he described in
his elegiac memoir Running for the Hills.
In their different ways these people give
him purpose, remaining loving, patient,
joke-full throughout his most entangled
moments of despair.
At times Clare copes, succeeding
in subduing persistent anxieties about
money and about his own creativity that
steal away his sleep in the depths of the
night. Christmas becomes a day of magic
and wonder, a day ‘wrapped in an old
sock and a myth’, seen through the inno-
cent eyes of a child. At other times, Clare
trembles on the edge. Some thugs have set
their brutal dogs on his mother’s precious
sheep. In the car on his way to Wales as
he rushes to comfort her, he anticipates,
rightly, a scene of Hardyesque diabolism.
Suddenly he is overwhelmed with rage
‘a howling violent thing exploding’ in the
pit of him.
There is something ancient and vis-
ceral about this book, in which birth and
love and death form part of an unadorned
rhythm of the passing days. The loyalty ofclose family and the enduring, sustain-
ing power of love are at the heart of what
matters: motherhood, fatherhood, and the
love of parents for children and for each
other. The account of a new father’s sense
of astonishment and humility at the arriv-
al of his first child is as transcendent as
any description of childbirth I know; and
the subsequent account of a baby’s first
few days of life ‘a world of pure expres-
sion, beyond the limits of language’ is
equally moving.
The stark, wintry landscape evoked in
Clare’s luminous prose — those ‘days as
bright as a magpie’s cackle’— is magni-
fied by the influence of other nature writ-
ers, Emily Brontë, Wallace Stevens, Louis
MacNeice and Patrick Kavanagh among
them. The Venerable Bede’s beautiful
allegory for the transitoriness of existence
is here too, when a frozen winter sparrow
momentarily flies through an open win-
dow into a warm, lighted room, returning
to darkness through another.
This is a deeply personal book, a story
of one man’s journey through the winter
months, struggling with his own anxie-
ties, and also one that addresses our own
deepest fears and insecurities. If Clare
does not emerge from the winter with his
original pledge wholly intact, the final
resolution that he embraces, as the snow
and ice begin to melt, is testament to his
resilience and a universal enticement to
approach the winter months joyfully and
fear-free.The relentless black rain of the
Yorkshire moors leads to engulfing
depression almost every winter day‘The Sorrows
of Boney, or
Meditations
on the Island
of Elba’,
published by
John Wallis,
15 April 1814PRIVATE COLLECTION/ MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY