Nelson

This second volume concludes the most comprehensive and intimate portrait of the life of Horatio Nelson ever written.

“This superb warts-and-all biography details the awe-inspiring ups and downs of the final eight years of British Admiral Horatio Nelson’s life. Sugden’s meticulously research, highly readable work will no doubt be the definitive portrait of a brilliant, fearless, inspiring warrior beset by flaws and vulnerabilities.” —Publishers Weekly (Best New Book of the Week)

Eight years in the writing, Sugden’s second volume brilliantly interweaves graphic accounts of Nelson’s famous victories at the battles of the Nile, Copenhagen, and Trafalgar with his lesser-known yet equally gripping campaigns to liberate the Italian states from French domination and his role in the blockade of Malta, often snatching blazing triumphs from crippling reverse.

Nelson emerges as a strong-minded but vulnerable human being in constant need of affection and reassurance, whose relations with superiors, colleagues, and friends were intense and stormy. We meet the fighting admiral in search of the ultimate military victory, the glory hunter skillfully manipulating his public images, and the indignant commoner trying to secure his position in a society dominated by wealth. Nelson is seen both as a family man and as the adulterer who scandalized society with his passion for the mercurial Lady Hamilton, whose own ambition for domestic tranquility was destroyed by Nelson’s untimely death at Trafalgar.

The triumphant and the tragic lend an epic yet human quality to the life of Nelson, and both are fully exploited here in a richly detailed narrative that reads like fiction and teems with a glittering array of sailors and civilians, heroes and villains, husbands, wives, and lovers.

“This ambitious and largely successful conclusion to a biography of a historical icon that has appeal for both scholars and general readers interested in British history.” —Booklist

“[Sugden] presents a masterly portrait of the hero as a man. . . . This is biography as it is meant to be.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A scholar’s dream . . . tremendously engaging.” —Kirkus Reviews