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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... command of the world ocean. But it was a meeting which their enemies, as they quite explicitly repeated in dispatch after dispatch to Madrid, Paris and on to Napoleon's mobile headquarters, then in Germany, did not desire at all. The ...
... command of Captain Graham Moore, as commodore of the squadron, was cruising off Cadiz, with orders to detain any Spanish ships they should fall in with. Early on the morning of 5 October, they spotted four large Spanish frigates coming ...
... command was full of unintended irony: The Formidable, the Mont Blanc, the Fougueux, [meaning the Ardent], and the Swiftsure [a ship captured from the British, and left with its earlier name as a taunt to the enemy] all need docking. The ...
... command of the premier fleet in France, the Brest squadron, wrote imploringly to the minister: I once more call your attention to the terrible state in which the sea men are left, unpaid for fifteen months, naked or covered with rags ...
... commands. In the 1780s there had been half-hearted attempts to recruit and promote men with a regard more to their skills than their names. There were officers among the aristocrats of great resource, ingenuity, courage and dedication ...
Spis treści
3 | |
Order and Anxiety | 49 |
Honour | 93 |
Love | 130 |
Boldness | 157 |
Violence | 209 |
Humanity | 239 |
Nobility | 275 |
bibliography | 319 |
index | 327 |
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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 |