Trafalgar
by Roy Adkins | 
Quarrel with the King
by Adam Nicolson |
To Rule the Waves
by Arthur Herman |
The Command of the Ocean
by N. A. M. Rodger | 
The Safeguard of the Sea
by N. A. M. Rodger |
The Wooden World
by N. A. M. Rodger |
The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery
by Paul Kennedy | 
1759
by Frank McLynn | 
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997
by Piers Brendon |
After the Victorians
by A. N. Wilson | 
The Prize of All the Oceans
by Glyn Williams | 
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
by Lawrence James | 
Dead Wake
by Erik Larson | 
One Summer: America, 1927
by Bill Bryson | 
Six Frigates
by Ian W. Toll |
102 Minutes
by Jim Dwyer | 
The History of Jihad
by Robert Spencer |
A History of Britain: The Wars of the British: 1603-1776
by Simon Schama | 
Five Days at Memorial
by Sheri Fink |
The Oregon Trail
by Rinker Buck |
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?