Andy Martin has managed just this, by discovering a side of Napoleon Bonaparte that has been little explored: his literary imagination and ambitions. From adolescence, Bonaparte was a bibliophile, squandering his meagre funds on books At 16, he wrote a melancholy essay, "On Suicide". A few years later, as the French Revolution raged, he shut himself away to hone his entry to a national essay competition. Napoleon felt that through writing he would achieve the glory he craved. Fuelled on a meagre diet, he laboured on his "Discourse of Happiness", aping his hero Rousseau, whose literary career had been launched by a similar contest.The young Napoleon's efforts were in vain. Despite his disappointment, he continued writing, turning his hand to journalism, even novels.

"In his early years, he definitely saw himself as one of the Enlightenment intelligentsia, an expatriate, a dissident and a writer," says Martin.Napoleon's Corsican roots made him an outsider. Constant jokes about his accent meant he was never allowed to feel French. At odds with the identity of his host nation, he drew on literature and art to forge his sense of reality. As a result, Martin argues, for Napoleon "everything and everyone was in essence a fiction". This was, according to Martin, what underlay his ruthlessness and vision.There is much evidence to support Martin's theory that his empire was shaped by a "pre-eminently literary mind".

From his earliest military triumphs, Bonaparte's astonishing literary imagination remained evident. On his Egyptian campaign, he carried with him 167 savants to make intellectual sense of the country: astronomers, artists, Orientalists, architects. The Egyptian expedition was, as Martin summarises, "an intellectual fantasy that acquired some bayonets". Whether in Europe, Asia or the Orient, Napoleon also dragged his portable library with him.He was intensely creative, according to Chateaubriand, "an extraordinary adventurer, endlessly generating new plans, dreaming up new laws, only feeling fully in charge when he is labouring to disrupt the established order". Sainte-Beuve described Napoleon as a great critic in his spare time. He read everything and collected every word written about him.

His feelings about books were never moderate; if they displeased him, he would toss them in the fire.Throughout his career, Napoleon had intense relationships with writers With those he admired, his attitude was respectful. He did not approach them "as a statesman or politician" but as a "philosopher" or a "literary critic". Goethe described Napoleon as having "the greatest understanding the world has ever seen". Scribes the Emperor disliked received altogether different treatment. He had the Marquis de Sade committed to Charenton, while the loathed Madame de Staël was banished, and in 1810 her book De l'Allemagne was destroyed.Martin's tangential approach to Napoleon brings an undeniable freshness, but it has its downside. It assumes a prior familiarity with Napoleon's history, without which it would be difficult to appreciate his narrative. As a result, the book will appeal largely to aficionados.And Martin's thesis remains irresistible.

After his defeat and exile to St Helena, Napoleon declared that he would "substitute the pen for the sword". In his compound at Longwood, he created a sort of literary factory. In an atmosphere as monastic as the writing days of his youth, Napoleon set about transforming his reputation from warrior to heroic giant. Reviewing the assembled material, he crowed "What a novel my life is!"The reviewer is writing a biography of the Empress Josephine. The Government's latest recruitment campaign for social workers has been so successful that the Department of Health is about to build on it with the launch of a second wave of advertisements.