Lady Antonia Fraser greets me from behind a mountain of books as I enter the drawing room in her Holland Park home. She is sitting, resplendent in pink, and greets me as if an old friend. The first two books that she draws my attention to are not written by her, but by her friends: Ambrogio A Caiani’s To Kidnap a Pope: Napoleon and Pius VII (a “riveting subject”) and Ruth Scurr’s Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows (a “completely original writer”). “You might think there have been enough biographies of Napoleon but actually both of them are completely brilliant and completely fascinating,” she tells me.