Napoleon and Josephine: An Improbable Marriage, by Josephine Bruce (Phoenix Giant, £9.99 in UK)

Josephine Bruce, the wife of an American diplomat, produced only a single book, but it is a good and very readable one. The Creole lady from widow of a supericilious aristocrat and mistress of the revolutionary politician Barras, would seem an unlikely mate for the ambitious, callow young Corsican artillery officer; but in fact the alliance worked splendidly until dynastic considerations forced Napoleon - now an emperor - to look for an heir. So he divorced her and married an Austrian archduchess, with whom he was happy until his own fall, but he remembered Josephine fondly in his last years of captivity in St Helena. A neat compromise between "popular" and scholarly history.