FISHER'S FACE - Or, Getting to Know the Admiral by Morris, Jan

Random House, NY. (1995). US First Edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6 x 8 1/2, FINE/FINE CONDITION, 300 pages.--------------------------------------------- Upon seeing a photograph of Lord Admiral Jack Fisher's face for the first time in 1950, Jan Morris was taken by a countenance of "extraordinary arrogance, superciliousness, humor, kindness and effrontery." If one were to guess the profession of the sitter, she suggests it might perhaps be "a character actor, a cardinal, an entrepreneur of the old velvet-collared kind, a tycoon or possibly an overhyped chef" But this was the Victorian Age commander of the Queen's Navy, at once a ribald seaman, dance lover and voracious Bible reader, and he made an indelible impression upon Morris's heart.Fisher's Face is a love affair forty-five years in the making, a brilliant biography that serves as a cultural and historical link between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and gives us a fascinating glimpse into as enigmatic a figure as England ever produced—a devout churchgoer and man of both mercurial humor and great violence. Jacky Fisher's remarkable friends and equally significant enemies helped define Britain's transit into modern times.-------------------------------------------------- As in her much-heralded Pax Britannica trilogy, Jan Morris once again animates history by painting a captivating, novelistic portrait of one of the best-known sailors of his day, a man who single-handedly brought the sluggish British Navy into the twentieth century. In her own words, "he was a cad, it seemed, a great gentleman, a genius, a coxcomb, a fraud, a true Christian and a damned Socialist. Only one thing did everybody seem to agree upon: he had a marvelous face."Fisher's Face is an involving chronicle of the past seen through one of history's great lived lives; witty, historically meticulous and written in Jan Morris's inimitably graceful prose, it will become yet another classic in her prodigious oeuvre.