Sir Arthur Bryant's celebrated histories of the Napoleonic wars are the perfect source for a new, vivid life of England's greatest Admiral, Lord Nelson. By careful selection and with the addition of some newly-written passages, Sir Arthur Bryant has created a colourful and highly readable history of Nelson's life for the general reader, concentrating on his major achievements, the series of great naval victories that were to give England supremacy at sea for more than a century.
The Battle of the Nile, the Battle of the Baltic, Nelson's pursuit of Villeneuve across the Atlantic, and of course Trafalgar, rank among the most dramatic and decisive of all naval engagements. Yet at the same time as Sir Arthur's flowing prose brings these great events richly to life, he also paints a convincing portrait of Nelson himself, both in his moments of disappointment and in his high peaks of triumph.
Complementing the text is a wealth of illustrations drawn from a wide variety of sources which add very considerably to the value of this handsome volume.
The illustration on the jacket is from the painting "The Hero of Trafalgar" by Overend, and is reproduced by kind permission of the Nelson Museum, Monmouth.
Sir Arthur Bryant has received many honours for his distinguished contributions to history and to literature. He has received the Honorary Doctorate of the Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and New Brunswick; he was awarded the C.B.E. in 1949, knighted in 1954 and made a Companion of Honour in 1965.
Sir Arthur has established himself as one of the most popular and readable of living historians. A master of the English language, every sentence and paragraph he writes is shaped to carry the reader irresistibly onwards. It is the qualities of excitement and vivid detail that make history by Sir Arthur Bryant as appealing to young readers as to his wide circle of confirmed admirers.
The range of Sir Arthur's work has been remarkable, and includes his life of Pepys, with which he established his reputation; his trilogy of the Napoleonic Wars of which the third volume, The Age of Elegance won the Sunday Times Gold Medal and Award for Literature; his two books based on the Alanbrooke Diaries which have become military classics of the last war; and a social history of England. "As a lover of history and of English I enjoy your writing more than that of any living historian," Lord Attlee wrote to Sir Arthur after reading The Medieval Foundation.
