Nelson.The Man and the Legend

London England: Bloomsbury, 2001. Hardback. First Edition. Nelson. The Man and the Legend. Price clipped to D/J. Horatio Nelson was a paramount naval genius and a natural-born predator, and those who look to find a saint besides will miss the man. In private life as in war he was ruthless. A fanatic for duty, at times beyond all sense, he was also a royalist so infatuated with the divine right of kinds that he began to see himself as an instrument of God. No one expects so great a marshal as Napoleon, or so implacable a general as Sherman, to be a saint as well, but Nelson has been encumbered with his own romantic legend, which he helped to create. So famous a story as the telescope held to the blind eye at Copenhagen is pure myth. The real Nelson was a man whose mind was, in his own words, fixed as fate, whose instinct was not just to defeat the enemy but to annihilate him. At the height of his fame he was half unhinged, a generous man who wanted his wife dead, besotted with Emma Hamilton but jealously unsure of her, at odds with his honourable father whose funeral he did not attent, at law with his old mentor Earl St Vincent over prize money, and damning the Lords of the Admirality as a set of beasts. Based almost entirely upon original letters and documents and will full apparatus, the author's fascinating new biography gives us a penetrating and original picture of an unfamiliar Nelson. Illustrated. 424 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions ,and all types of Academic Literature.) . First Edition. Cloth. Fine/Near Fine. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" Tall Octavo. Hardback.