and now we refer to little men with grander ambitions as having Napoleonic complexes.'

'But do you draw a connection between the two and go back to this idea of the Napoleonic complex that is somehow compensation? The reputation is that he was a little man. 'Bumbler on a personal level,' Scott said. Phillips said, 'You may make him out as a bit of a bumbler in his love life.' She may have also been, according to Scott, the only person to tell him to his face what he really was: You are just a brute that is nothing without me. She could lead him into a room where he didn't know how to walk. But there was another aspect of his life that Scott thinks history hasn't stressed enough: Josephine, the aristocratic widow who became Napoleon's obsession, wife and empress: 'What was most telling were the letters of Bonaparte to Josephine, because I wanted the centerpiece of the story not to be just about battles, but about this Achilles' heel towards this woman, which is not about sex, it was about social graces. The history books are full of Napoleon's triumphs. I think it's a character study with violence, with action, with everything you got. But I think we then glean the best of the best. No, are you f***ing kidding me? So, sorry. 'I'm not going to walk into that deathtrap.