Simon Heffer
Hooray For Horatio
The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson
By Roger Knight
Allen Lane 874pp £30 order from our bookshop
The bicentenary of Trafalgar has allowed authors, documentary-makers and journalists to dive back headlong into the colourful world of George III’s navy: rum, sodomy and the lash all right, but also the excitement of the pursuit of the French fleet to the point of its effective destruction at the battle itself, off Spain, on 21 October 1805. Yet this superb book by Roger Knight – a professional maritime historian whose achievement in this study of Nelson will now make it the definitive life – prompts a more important reflection: upon the nature of heroism, not merely in an age very different from our own, but in any context at any time.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings
In Ali Smith's "Summer", 'the coronavirus pandemic has arrived. Lockdown happens too. There are allusions to Black Lives Matter, to online abuse and radicalisation, to things so recently news that it feels shocking to find them in a novel.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/seasons-heatings