This biography of Nelson was a Whitbread Biography Award runner up in 1987. It is very well written and comprehensively covers all aspects of the life of this national hero. He was a man of great contrasts: a hero on the national scale who saved the country from the very real threat of French invasion, yet retained the respect, admiration and love of the common sailor; of relatively humble origins compared to other naval officers, the son of a Norfolk clergyman, he was the friend of the highest in society including William Pitt and King George III; while intervening in individual cases of injustice in favour of the common sailor, he was also a reactionary supporter of the monarchy both in Britain and in Naples, who had no sympathy for rising liberal ideas promoted by Thomas Paine and others (though he spoke in favour of an old comrade tried and hanged for planning regicide); while brought up in a morally conventional ethos, he flouted society's conventions by his affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, outrageously living in a menage a trois with her and her much older husband, Sir William, and treating his wife Fanny very shabbily.

This book took me a while to get through; I began it after a recent return visit to Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Parts of it dragged for me and I have always found reading descriptions of military engagements fairly dull, though the description of Trafalgar here is gripping as one leads up to the inevitable outcome. It is undoubtedly a work of great scholarship and a definitive biography. ( )