Southey on Nelson

LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLD

A radical new series – edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Every book is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.

This short, brilliant, action-packed biography appeared only eight years after Nelson’s death at the Battle of Trafalgar (a scene unforgettably described). It helped transform Nelson into the most popular wartime hero that Britain has ever placed on top of a column.

It first gave currency to the proverbial stories of his courage and exhibitionism, from the ‘blind eye’ at Copenhagen, to ‘Kiss me, Hardy’ and the scandal of ‘Beloved Emma’ at Naples. It was written by the romantic poet and historian Robert Southey, a one-time radical who was converted to patriotism by Nelson’s shining (though not ‘untarnished’) example.

About the author

Richard Holmes is our greatest living biographer. His biography of Shelley won the Somerset Maugham Prize. Footsteps (1985) revolutionized the way biography was thought about and written. The first part of his biography of Coleridge won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Prize. His portrait of the friendship between Dr Johnson and Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. The concluding volume of his Coleridge biography won the Duff Cooper Prize and the William Heinemann award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy, and lives in London and Norwich with the novelist Rose Tremain.