Horatio Nelson was a naval genius and a natural born predator. In his private life as in war he was ruthless. A fanatic for duty, at times beyond all sense, he was also a royalist so infatuated with the divine right of kings that he began to see himself as an instrument of God. The real Nelson was a man whose mind was, in his own words, fixed as fate, whose instinct was not just to defeat the enemy but annihilate him. At the height of his fame he was half unhinged- a generous man who wanted his wife dead; besotted with Emma Hamilton but jealously unsure of her; at odds with his honourable father whose funeral he did not attend; at law with his old mentor Earl St Vincent over prize money, and damning the Lords of the Admiralty as a set of beasts. Written with access to letters and documents and with previously unpublished material, Terry Coleman has given us a penetrating and true picture of Nelson as we have never seen him before.