ON THE COVER: ILLUSTRATION: JEAN-MICHEL GIRARD/WWW.THE-ART-AGENCY.CO.UK, ALAMY X1, ISTOCK X1, GETTY IMAGES X4, COVER IMAGE ENHANCEMENT - CHRIS STOCKERDESIGN.CO.UK/ON THIS PAGE: GETTY IMAGES X1
An estimated 107 billion people have ever lived, and yet only a very few are recognisable by a single name – Plato, Cleopatra, Michelangelo, Pelé, Napoleon. These are people who have truly made history. It says much about our cover star that his own arch-rival, the Duke of Wellington, said that the Emperor of France was worth 40,000 men. Few men, after all, could rise from humble beginnings to conquer much of Europe; even fewer could escape from exile and do it all over again. His remarkable rise and fall (and rise and fall) begins on page 24.
History is packed with big names, of course, but none of them exist outside the context of their times. So this issue, we set our sights on some scintillating societies. We travel to Sparta (p34, that brutal Ancient Greek city-state, to reveal the ruthless regime that made it such a power. And we celebrate Jane Austen’s 200th anniversary (p43 by looking at the world her books reflect, where marriage and manners could be everything. We also visit the Wild West (p70, and learn that there was more to the frontier than heroes and villains, and look back to the early years of Northern Ireland’s Troubles (p50.