Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and the Battle of TrafalgarHarper Collins, 9 sie 2005 - 341 In Seize the Fire, Adam Nicolson, author of the widely acclaimed God's Secretaries, takes the great naval battle of Trafalgar, fought between the British and Franco-Spanish fleets in October 1805, and uses it to examine our idea 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 conjurer 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 and passionately engaged depiction of a frame of mind at a turning point in world history. |
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... Victory's heading and speed: 067 ̊–078 ̊ at 3 knots Zeal: passionate ardour for any cause Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 1755 At 5.50 on the morning of 21 October 1805, just as dawn was coming up, the look-outs ...
... Victory, a slight, grey-haired 47-year-old man, alert, wiry, anxious and intense, five feet four inches tall and irresistibly captivating in manner. Before battle, the remains of the arm he had lost in a catastrophic fight against the ...
... victory,' the 19th-century Spanish nationalist Manuel Marliani later wrote of Trafalgar. It was a catastrophically self-fulfilling frame of mind. Threads and fragments of the European Enlightenment had found their way into Spain. The ...
... victory might have been preferable but who considered nothing more honourable than an exceptionally bloody defeat. On 20 October, Gravina listed the men on board his flagship, the Principe de Asturias: Infantry troops 382; marine ...
... Victory is neither a luxury nor an ornament. It is a compulsion and a necessity. The young French gardes, convinced of their genetic and social superiority, often behaved with a kind of violent arrogance which more senior naval officers ...
Spis treści
3 | |
Order and Anxiety | 49 |
Honour | 93 |
Love | 130 |
Boldness | 157 |
Violence | 209 |
Humanity | 239 |
Nobility | 275 |
bibliography | 319 |
index | 327 |
Inne wydania - Wyświetl wszystko
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson's Battle of Trafalgar Adam Nicolson Ograniczony podgląd - 2009 |
Seize the Fire: Heroism, Duty, and Nelson's Battle of Trafalgar Adam Nicolson Podgląd niedostępny - 2006 |