Waterloo: Napoleon's last gamble Andrew Roberts HarperCollins, 143pp, £12.99 ISBN 0007190751

Before setting foot on France's Mediterranean coast on 1 March 1815, Napoleon had, like Prospero, been "master of a full poor cell" on his island-prison of Elba. With his escape from that humiliating exile, the extraordinary period of French history known as the Hundred Days began. When the former emperor arrived in Paris, having made his way through parts of the French countryside loyal to the restored monarchy, he was greeted by an overjoyed mob - Louis XVIII having already fled. According to one observer, it was "like witnessing the Resurrection of Christ".

In Waterloo, Andrew Roberts tells the story of the battle that, as every school-boy knows (or would, if Tory education spokesmen had their way), put an end to Napoleon's glorious return to the throne. As emperor, Napoleon had subjected most of western Europe to his rule. Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia were hardly going to let him repeat the feat. Five days after he reached Paris, they formed the Seventh Coalition. Troops soon converged on the borders of France.

Roberts, whose previous works include biographies of Lords Halifax and Salisbury as well as parallel portraits of Hitler/ Churchill and Wellington/Napoleon, belongs to the "great men" school of history. He portrays Waterloo as a tactical battle between two military titans, a game of strategy that Napoleon lost through misfortune, misadventure and misplaced confidence. For him, this was the last hurrah of an age of "gorgeously coloured uniforms", when men advanced stoically to their deaths and military commanders attended society balls on the eve of battle. He gives little consideration to the experiences of lower-ranking soldiers or the reality of war.

Roberts sees "chivalry" and "aesthetic beauty" in the carnage, and relates how the British ranks cried "Shame! Shame!" as a French officer, having been polished off with a gunshot to the head, was robbed by a pair of German soldiers. Wellington spews out implausible aphorisms ("Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained"); Napoleon lives up to his reputation as a flawed genius and hubristic cad.

All this becomes rather tedious. It is hard to identify with the protagonists or remain interested in the methodical account of the action. The pace finally picks up as the battle reaches the fourth of its five stages, and hits top speed when the author zooms in on the doomed British defence of the tumbledown farmhouse at La Haye Sainte. However, Roberts gives little sense of the drama of the fighting. Unhelpfully, the book contains only two maps (not including the battlefield that the author urges his readers to visit) and almost all the other images are portraits of immaculately turned-out officers. Too much of the time, Waterloo reads like the chess or bridge problem in a newspaper.

Furthermore, without any background to the campaign, the reader is left to wonder how significant Waterloo really was. The conflict that Roberts claims "ended for ever the greatest personal world-historical epic since that of Julius Caesar" seems like an anticlimax.

This slim volume does contain some interesting information for the casual reader, although mostly this relates to the fascination that Waterloo continues to hold in certain circles. Did you know, for example, that a climatologist has "recently created a weather map of the low-pressure ridge that moved over the battlefield for about 48 hours before the fighting began"; that, with the help of "modern war-gaming techniques", nerds can now work out how Napoleon could have won; and that a book exists called Charge!: great cavalry charges of the Napoleonic wars?

These are the moments of light relief in a book that pays too much attention to the big guns. The day on which Napoleon was finally overthrown deserves to be fleshed out. And surely the men who made his last stand possible - as well as those who helped bring him down - merit as much recognition as the weather?

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