Horatio Nelson: A Controversial Hero Book

This fresh and groundbreaking biography illuminates the life and analyzes the fabled reputation of Britain's most famous admiral and naval hero. The controversial aspects of Horatio Nelson’s life and career, such as his involvement in the defeat of the Napoleonic revolution and his notorious love affair with Lady Hamilton, are comprehensively explored and new research reveals fresh insights into the character of this complex man and the way his image was developed by successive generations of biographers and naval historians. Czisnik also traces how the figure of Nelson has evolved in the popular imagination during the past two hundred years, examining imagery, propaganda and fiction, as well as the perception of the admiral from French, Spanish and German perspectives. This distinctive contribution to biography expertly reveals how the real man has been obscured, distorted and misunderstood by those who promoted image over reality. Dr. Marianne Czisnik is a leading scholar and has published on a wide range of topics related to Horation Nelson. She has a law degree and practiced in Germany before becoming a researcher of Nelson at the University of Edinburgh. This fresh and groundbreaking biography illuminates the life and analyzes the fabled reputation of Britain's most famous admiral and naval hero. The controversial aspects of Horatio Nelson’s life and career, such as his involvement in the defeat of the Napoleonic revolution and his notorious love affair with Lady Hamilton, are comprehensively explored and new research reveals fresh insights into the character of this complex man and the way his image was developed by successive generations of biographers and naval historians. Czisnik also traces how the figure of Nelson has evolved in the popular imagination during the past two hundred years, examining imagery, propaganda and fiction, as well as the perception of the admiral from French, Spanish and German perspectives. This distinctive contribution to biography expertly reveals how the real man has been obscured, distorted and misunderstood by those who promoted image over reality. "Demonstrates that there is still much more to understand about this man. Czisnik...demonstrates the necessity to suspend for a time the business of writing full but superficial and subjective biographies, and to take a more clinical and analytical approach...The result is that we get to know Nelson more intimately than in even the fullest of the other biographies."—History in Focus 'The distinctive nature of this book is that it focuses on the way Nelson was seen by contemporaries and subsequent generations...and is based on a complete mastery of the correspondence between Nelson and Lady Hamilton. This is a book of real insight: there is no blandness; it is very readable."—Dr Michael Duffy, University of Exeter "Demonstrates that there is still much more to understand about this man. Czisnik, significantly not of the UK, demonstrates the necessity to suspend for a time the business of writing full but superficial and subjective biographies, and to take a more clinical and analytical approach to a character that even contemporaries acknowledged as complex...The result is that we get to know Nelson more intimately than in even the fullest of the other biographies."—History in Focus Read More