The hero with a hundred faults

The Duke of Wellington once bumped into Nelson in a minister’s anteroom. Nelson had no idea who Wellington was (it was before he was famous), and at first Nelson talked entirely about himself, and in a style so vain and silly that Wellington was disgusted. Then Nelson briefly left the room, checked out Wellington’s identity, and returned to talk as one officer to another in a way that Wellington found altogether fascinating.

There were two sides to Nelson. The most brilliant naval commander of all time was also a shameless self-publicist and the spoiled celebrity lover of Emma Hamilton. Perhaps these contradictions are what make him endlessly fascinating to biographers. The bicentenary of the battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) comes around next year, and the first of the new crop of Nelson books is already filling bookshops. The weightiest of these is the major new biography by John Sugden. As a naval historian, Sugden is mainly concerned with Nelson the sailor — a driven man, supremely self-confident, opportunistic and capable of taking calculated risks of an extraordinary kind.