Seize the Fire

In October 1805, Lord Horatio Nelson led the British Royal Navy to a decisive victory over the Franco-Spanish fleets. Adam Nicolson, author of the widely acclaimed God’s Secretaries, uses the Battle of Trafalgar to examine our idea of heroism and the heroic. Is violence a necessary aspect of the hero? Why did the cult of the hero flower in the late 18th and 19th centuries in a way it hadn’t for 200 years? Was Lord Horatio Nelson an aberration or simply the product of his time, “the conjuror of violence” which England, at some level, deeply needed?

Seize the Fire not only vividly describes the brutal realities of battle, but also enters the hearts and minds of those who were there. It is a passionately engaged depiction of a turning point in world history.

Adam Nicolson lives on a 90-acre farm near Burwash with his wife and five children. In the past he has been both a publisher and a travel writer. He has written books on Eastern Europe, the American West, the evolution of the small English town and the Somerset Levels. He has won both a Somerset Maugham Award and the British Topography Prize and has been shortlisted for Newspaper Feature Writer of the Year.

“[A] stirring, vividly written book.”— New York Times Book Review