This Dark Business

Between two attempts in 1800 and 1804 to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte, the
British government launched a campaign of black propaganda of unprecedented
scope and intensity to persuade George III's reluctant subjects to fight the
Napoleonic War, a war to the death against one man: the Corsican usurper and
tyrant.

This Dark Business tells the story of the British government's determination
to destroy Napoleon Bonaparte by any means possible. We have been taught to
think of Napoleon as the aggressor - a man with an unquenchable thirst for war
and glory - but what if this story masked the real truth: that the British
refusal to make peace either with revolutionary France or with the man who
claimed to personify the revolution was the reason this Great War continued
for more than twenty years? At this pivotal moment when it consolidated its
place as number one world power Britain was uncompromising. To secure the
continuing rule of Church and King, the British invented an evil enemy, the
perpetrator of any number of dark deeds; and having blackened Napoleon's name,
with the help of networks of French royalist spies and hitmen, they also tried
to assassinate him.

This Dark Business plunges the reader into the hidden underworld of Georgian
politics in which, faced with the terrifying prospect of revolution, bribery
and coercion are the normal means to secure compliance, a ruthless world of
spies, plots and lies.