Simon Heffer

Hooray For Horatio

The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson

By

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.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • . is next week! The programme is excellent and there are free copies of Literary Review, to boot! ,
    • 'Britain's spy chief in the Congo replied to a fellow peer who asked her whether SIS played any part in its prime m… ,
    • This month Lucy Popescu covers the plight of poet Galal El-Behairy and activist Wael Abbas in Egypt's crack-down on… ,
    • 'I fear that defending an 18th-century agrarian economist against – well, against whom exactly? – is not the best u… ,
    • 'He lacks empathy with all but the wealthy and has no grasp of the struggles faced by the majority of his concitoye… ,
    • Here's Richard Vinen's review of A Certain Idea of France by Julian Jackson: ,
    • RT : James Crabtree's 'Billionaire Raj' - my review for . "...For sheer chutzpah, India’s billionaires provid… ,
    Follow Us