Synopsis
From the bestselling author of Under the Black Flag comes the definitive biography of Thomas Cochrane, the swashbuckling nineteenth-century maritime hero upon whom Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower are based.
The Washington Post - Ken Ringle
The stops and starts and shifting alliances of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815), including, in a larger sense, our own War of 1812 with Britain, tend to blur the memory of even passionate history buffs, and one of the strengths of Cordingly's narrative is how well he places the naval battles, which the British could never seem to lose, against those on land, where they could hardly seem to win. He also excels at describing the world of the age of sail (keeping nautical jargon to a merciful minimum) and the socio-political arcana of early-19th-century Britain, with its "rotten boroughs" and "pocket boroughs" and Dickensian brutality. But his signal achievement is in bringing to life both the conflicted genius of Cochrane and the remarkable cultural context in which he lived.