"In 1812, when he was retreating from the blood and confusion of Moscow and the disastrous , Napoleon had remarked that there was only a single step separating the sublime from the ridiculous. From moment that he was deposited on , until the day when his body was finally removed from the island twenty-five years later, the sublime and the ridiculous were often so closely intertwined that it was impossible to separate the one from the other. The servants and companions who were with him on the island still treated him with all the fear and respect that was owing to an , but the more they bobbed and bowed in Napoleon's presence and tried to maintain the illusion of , the more rigidly they need to shut out any mirror reflection of what they were doing and how they looked while they were doing it."
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Novelists from EnglandNon-fiction authors from EnglandPeople from LondonMemoirists from EnglandFellows of the Royal Society of Literature
Original Language: English
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(288 pages; 1st edition 1991)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Julia_Blackburn
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Julia Blackburn
(born 1948 in London) is a British author of several non-fiction books, two novels, and a memoir The Three of Us: A Family Story (2008), which won the 2009 . She was elected in 2002 a .
5 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Julia Blackburn →
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