Adam Nicolson

"What is the nature of things? What is justice? How can I be myself? How should we treat each other? Before the Greeks, the idea of the world was dominated by god-kings and their priests. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in a succession of small eastern Mediterranean harbor cities, a few heroic men and women decided to cast off mental subservience and apply their own thinking minds to the conundrums of life. These great innovators shaped the beginnings...

"Strikingly original. . . . Nicolson brings to life superbly the horror, devastation, and gore of Trafalgar." -The Economist Adam Nicolson takes the great naval battle of Trafalgar, fought between the British and Franco-Spanish fleets, and uses it to examine our idea of heroism and the heroic. A story rich with modern resonance, Seize the Fire reveals the economic impact of the battle as a victorious Great Britain emerged as a global commercial empire. In...

Adam Nicolson sees the Iliad and the Odyssey as the foundation myths of Greek-and our-consciousness, collapsing the passage of 4,000 years and making the distant past of the Mediterranean world as immediate to us as the events of our own time. Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past, not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic,...

"June 1797 to September 1798 is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and 'Kubla Khan,' as well as his unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, and William Wordsworth’s revolutionary songs in Lyrical Ballads along with 'Tintern Abbey,' Wordsworth's paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding. In The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicolson embeds himself in...