Adam Zamoyski (born 1949) is a British historian of Polish descent whose work concentrates on Poland, the Napoleonic era and the political and cultural history of Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Born in New York to Polish parents who had been forced into exile by the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in 1939, he was brought up in Britain and elsewhere in Europe. He studied History and Modern Languages at Queen’s College, Oxford, and speaks Polish, Russian, French and Italian, allowing him to work extensively with sources from across Europe. Although he has not pursued a conventional academic career, he is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Society of Literature. His family background and repeated visits to Poland from the late 1960s helped shape his particular interest in Polish history and its place within the wider European story.
His books range from national history and biography to detailed studies of war, revolution and diplomacy. The Polish Way and its later successor Poland: A History provide broad histories of Poland, while The Last King of Poland examines Stanisław II Augustus and the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow reconstructs Napoleon’s catastrophic Russian campaign, and Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna follows the defeat of Napoleon and diplomatic reconstruction of Europe. His biography Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth attempts to separate the historical individual from both heroic and hostile legends, while Warsaw 1920 deals with the Polish-Soviet War and the Battle of Warsaw. Other major works include Holy Madness, on revolutionary nationalism in nineteenth-century Europe; Phantom Terror, on European fears of revolution after Napoleon; biographies of Chopin and Paderewski; and The Forgotten Few, about Polish airmen in the Second World War. His more recent Izabela the Valiant tells the life of his ancestor Princess Izabela Czartoryska against the background of the partitions of Poland, revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
