Napoleon, who must have inspired more biographies than any other figure in history, is the subject of three more released by publishers in the last few months.

He's a man about whom it is easy to have negative feelings - John Keegan, whose military writing I think is outstanding, dislikes him. Victor David Hansen, whose writing about international affairs also seems outstanding to me, thinks he was a thug… a money-driven thief.

And the British historian Paul Johnson, from whom I have admiringly quoted before, and who has written one of the new biographies, Napoleon: A Penguin Life for… well, it is a Penguin series, of course… thinks he was an egotistical monster, a man so wrapped up in himself that he found it impossible to conduct a conversation.

Yet others, and I'm one of them, find him one of the most interesting historical figures - a source of inspiration.

A man or a woman who lives any but the most cloistered of lives inevitably acquires a dark side. The more intense the life, the more extensive and more intensely dark the dark side becomes. But in assessing people's fitness for being admired, it is surely a mistake to separate the good from the bad, and to treat them as discretely existing things. Good and bad, as Buddhists say, have a polar relationship. One cannot exist out of the presence of the other.

Yes, it must be right that Napoleon was responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people, but one cannot lead huge armies into battle without being so responsible.

One cannot be, for decades, the leader of one of the two greatest powers of the world of that day without betrayals and renunciations and fairly bloody barbarity. And leadership of that type makes a man turn his back, more or less, on a normal, chatty social life and dooms him to keeping little company but his own.

Who could emerge from a lifetime of the wild successes and terrible defeats that Napoleon experienced as other than an insecure, duplicitous megalomaniac? So when Mr. Johnson criticises Napoleon for bolting his food, for sleeping at concerts, for seducing women without the backdrop of romance, for being less of a soldier than he thinks Wellington was… one begins to suspect that there is something other than a simple weighing - up of good points and bad points going on.

He recounts the report of Napoleon's autopsy this way: “The teeth were healthy, but stained black by the chewing of liquorice. The left kidney was one third larger than the right. The urinary bladder was small and it contained gravel; the mucosa was thickened with numerous red patches. Had the urethra been sectioned (or so runs the theory) it would probably have demonstrated a small circular scar, too tight to allow the passing of even small stones.

That would have been the key to the slow declined in health and performance that started with Bonaparte was in his late thirties. The body was what doctors call ‘feminised' - that is, covered by a deep layer of fat, with scarcely any hair and well - developed breasts and mons veneris. The shoulders were narrow, hips broad, and genitals small. We can all make up our minds about these findings, their significance and reliability.”

Is that what a man who wanted to extract what he could from the life of his subject would have written? Or is it what a man who wanted to bring his subject down to the level of the most ordinary of men would have written?

Is Johnson simply acting out the well - known English dislike for the French? That dislike was more obvious, and more openly talked about in the past than it is now. Two ships sank disastrously in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, the French Medusa and the British Alceste.

An Edinburgh Review in 1818 carried an article contrasting the behaviour of the French crew of the Medusa with the behaviour of the British crew of the Alceste.

“No nation is so enthusiastically fond of glory, so essentially enterprising, ambitious and warlike, as the French. But the impetuosity of their courage exposes them to reverses, in which they are much depressed and as abject, as in prosperity they are arrogant and headstrong.”

The courage of the British, on the other hand, was said to be “neither so buoyant in prosperity, nor so dejected in reverses”:

“It is, like all our other qualities, accompanied by reflexion; and where the valour of a Frenchman begins to fail, the courage of an Englishman rises, from the resources he finds within his mind and heart. He is circumspect while the tempest only threatens; but intrepid when it bursts upon him. He requires no motive, but danger, to be brave; and his fortitude does not abandon him, even when his courage can be of no avail.”

The British dislike of Napoleon Bonaparte was certainly based on fear of his successes as a military commander - English mothers used to threaten their naughty children by saying that Boney would come and get them if they didn't behave - but also upon the fact that he could not be relied upon to behave like a normal, cowardly Frenchy who would run when things went badly for him.

Johnson perhaps gives himself away when he suggests that “At the beginning of the 21st Century, if we are to avoid the tragic mistakes of the 20th, we must learn from Bonaparte's life what to fear and what to avoid… We have to learn again the central lesson of history: that all forms of greatness, military and administrative, nation and empire building, are as nothing - indeed are perilous in the extreme - without a humble and contrite heart.”

Nearly 20 years ago another Johnson book, Modern Times, attacked the notion, long current among 20th Century intellectuals, that “leftist” dictators were somehow more acceptable than the rightist or fascist variety; a dictator is a dictator, he asserted, irrespective of professed ideology.

It is perfectly natural and correct to see Napoleon as a dictator, even though the word might in his time not have been understood in the way we understand it now, so it may be that Johnson, known for having unequivocal views, has been trapped by his past assertions into seeing no good in any dictator, from no matter what age.

It is perhaps less a biography of Napoleon that Mr. Johnson has written than it is a moralising essay, for our particular time, about men who would dare to try to emulate the dictator in Napoleon. That seems to me as silly as his suggestion that great military leaders must all have humble and contrite hearts.

We live in a world in which people have begun to lose their ability to tell good from evil… a world in which some people would like to persuade us that evil no longer exists, if it ever did, despite ample evidence, all around us, that it does exist and is thriving. We live in a world in which it has become fashionable to insist that no man should stand out above others.

But paradoxically, our times quite obviously demand men who are able to rise above the ordinary. We need our heroes more than we have ever done before.

Napoleon himself wrote that the only way to become a great general is to read and re-read accounts of the behaviour of the great generals of the past, who he listed as Gustavius Adolphus, Turenne, Frederick, Alexander, Hannibal and Caesar. We would probably make a different list for ourselves today, but what he said is no less true for that.

Napoleon would not approve of the appetite among Europeans for federalism, for international bodies to take precedence over national boundaries. The United Nations would appal him, he would see it as a body almost deliberately designed to suck the possibility of success from any enterprise involving force of arms.

He wrote that a commander who sought instructive wisdom in debates and conferences would “arrive at the result which in all ages has followed such a course, namely, by making the worst decision, which almost always in war is the most pusillanimous, or the most prudent. True wisdom in a general means energy.”

Energy was something he had in abundance. And ambition. And self confidence. And the ability to grasp and wield authority. And the ability to inspire people to follow and help him…even to worship him.

Like John Kennedy, he made things happen, he made public life and the possibilities of communal action look different... greater than they had been before.

Goethe said “Everyone who has served under Napoleon has shattered the world. Nothing appears impossible.”

I think Mr. Johnson diminishes himself considerably by trying to bring this great man, of whom Wellington wrote “I used to say of him that his presence on the field made the difference of forty thousand men” down to the level of a monstrous little dictator with liquorice-stained teeth.

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