He­roes are unfashionable among serious his­torians, but Richard Holmes, in a new biography, concludes that the first Duke of Wellington “was undoubtedly great”. This is no glib judgment, for Mr. Holmes ac­knowledges the recent assaults on the duke’s reputation and, while not finding him guiltless, still leaves him noble.

The subtitle of Mr. Holmes’s biography is “The Iron Duke”, a nickname that did not come from the battlefield, but from Wel­lington’s political years during which he installed metal shutters on his house to prevent irate mobs from breaking his win­dows. As a politician, then, the duke was not quite the paragon he was in battle, but Mr. Holmes is above all a military histo­rian, and he devotes a scant 46 pages to the duke’s final 37 years during which the vic­tor of Waterloo became prime minister.

This is not a complete biography, but rather a companion to Mr. Holmes’s bbc television series which concentrated on the duke’s military years. Were it not for the lure of the camera, it is doubtful that he book would have been written, for it follows hard on the heels of Christopher Hibbert’s masterful life of Wellington (Per­seus, 1997) which, like Mr. Holmes’s, was written for a general audience. Yet Mr. Holmes, like Mr. Hibbert, is incapable of writing a bad book and this biography is efficient and judicious.

Wellington complained that he had been “much exposed to authors”, a lament that would have been scorned by his prin­cipal opponent who loved fame as he loved battle and who, during his exile on Saint Helena, used a dishonest pen to gain revenge on his enemies. Napoleon’s biog­raphers have been disentangling the re­cord ever since and few have made as painstaking an effort as Frank McLynn.

His biography of Bonaparte was pub­lished in Britain five years ago and might have been expected to appear in America much sooner than this had that field not been held by Robert Asprey’s recent two-volume biography of Napoleon (Basic Books, 2000-01). Mr. Asprey, a military man, worships at the shrine, but Mr. McLynn prefers the couch. Napoleon, we are assured, is the “acme of primitivism” complicated by a “Joseph complex” (Jo­seph being his elder brother). He possesses an “unconscious desire for revenge against the opposite sex”, a “mother fixation” and, hardly surprising, a “mother complex”; to this witches’ brew is added “a fear of illicit sexual relations”, all of which, presum­ably, adds up to a Napoleon complex.