Eager for the fight

Horatio Nelson is England’s most loved military hero. Marlborough is remote from our view, and the aristocratic Wellington was perhaps too stiff and unbending a Tory for popular taste. Nelson, by contrast, had an engaging personality and a colourful private life. The disabling wounds that he suffered and the affecting circumstances of his death in the midst of the country’s greatest naval victory have secured him in the national memory. The navy, at any rate, has deeper roots in national sentiment than the army; it was seapower, after all, that carried Great Britain and its empire to pre-eminence in the world.

The second volume of John Sugden’s biography, covering the last eight years of Nelson’s life, might have been shorter. The piling on of unimportant details is at times wearying. Do we need to know that Nelson stopped for an uneventful lunch at an inn and that the inn had five floors with a store at ground level? Or that at a service of worship Emma Hamilton wore a white blouse? Some fruits of research are best left unharvested.