Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of Trafalgar

 
From the press:
In Seize the Fire, Adam Nicolson, takes the great naval battle of Trafalgar, fought between the British and Franco-Spanish fleets in October 1805, and uses it to examine ideas of heroism and the heroic. Is violence a necessary aspect of the hero? And daring? Why did the cult of the hero flower in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in a way it hadn't for two hundred years? Was the figure of Nelson — intemperate, charming, theatrical, anxious, impetuous, considerate, indifferent to death and danger, inspirational to those around him, and, above all, fixed on attack and victory — an aberration in Enlightenment England? Or was the greatest of all English military heroes simply the product of his time, “the conjuror of violence” that England, at some level, deeply needed?
It is a story rich with modern resonance. This was a battle fought for the control of a global commercial empire. It was won by the emerging British world power, which was widely condemned on the continent of Europe as “the arrogant usurper of the freedom of the seas.” Seize the Fire not only vividly describes the brutal realities of battle but enters the hearts and minds of the men who were there; it is a portrait of a moment, a close depiction of a frame of mind at a turning point in world history.
 
Adam Nicolson is the author of the British national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book God's Secretaries. He is the winner of the Somerset Maugham and William Heinemann Prizes, and lives with his family at Sissinghurst Castle.

The British title of this book is Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero