“A monster of egotism”: Dominic Sandbrook reveals the secret to Admiral Nelson’s unstoppable success

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Sandbrook, author of the book Adventures in Time: Nelson, Hero of the Seas (Particular Books, 2025). draws a striking comparison between Nelson and Alexander the Great, suggesting that both of these titanic figures in military history were driven by a restless yearning for more and a deep-seated ego.

Was Nelson always determined to be a star of history?

Admiral Nelson, much like Alexander, was ambitious enough to shape his own legend. He was born in 1758, the sixth of 11 children, and joined the navy at the age of 12. It wasn’t long before he began to see himself as a great figure in history, says Sandbrook, and as a man whose name would be remembered for centuries.

“He has a sort of show-bizzy sense of himself as the star of the story, and he's determined to turn himself into the star of the story from quite a young age,” explains Sandbrook.

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This insatiable drive for recognition led Nelson to constantly push for more. For the admiral, no honour, no reward, and no title ever felt sufficient for the scale of his achievements. “He's impatient for glory. With every kind of reward that he's given from the government, he always thinks it's not enough. His peerage isn't enough. He wants a better peerage, he wants a fancy country house.”

Sandbrook notes that the ancient Greeks had a word for this relentless ambition: “The Greeks said of Alexander the Great that he had this thing they called pothos, which was the sense of kind of yearning, a kind of dreaminess, again, a kind of restlessness. Never satisfied, always pushing beyond [limits].”

According to Sandbrook, Nelson shared this same characteristic. When most people would be content with victory, he was already thinking about the next conquest. Even as he lay dying after his triumph at Trafalgar, Nelson was still counting victories, still setting expectations.

“Nelson has all these flaws and he's not perfect,” Sandbrook continues. “He’s a monster of egotism. He's so driven. He must have been exhausting in some ways, and it's got always got to be about him.”

Nelson’s sense of destiny

But it wasn’t just his own sense of what he could achieve that drove Nelson – Sandbrook says the admiral had a grander vision of his own place in history.

Sandbrook details how many of Nelson’s contemporaries found this larger-than-life persona overwhelming. His ego, his hunger for recognition, and his desire to craft his own myth sometimes made him difficult to deal with.

“We know that he's got a kind of romantic sense of destiny,” explains Sandbrook – though that in itself had its challenges for those surrounding Nelson. “Great men of history often have an enormous sense of ego, and that's something that obviously Nelson’s superiors found very off-putting.”

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It was precisely this combination of relentless ambition, self-belief, and awareness of his place in history that made Nelson the leader he was, according to Sandbrook: something that draws him into sharp comparison with the likes of Alexander the Great.

Without his extraordinary drive, his conviction in his own greatness, and his refusal to settle for anything less than total success, he might never have achieved the naval victories that secured Britain’s dominance.

Was Nelson Britain’s Alexander the Great?

In the eyes of Sandbrook, both Nelson and Alexander were men who reshaped history. Neither was satisfied with what they had, and victory only made them hungry for more.

Alexander, after conquering Persia, could have returned home in triumph. Instead, he kept going, marching his armies toward India, always seeking the next horizon to dominate. Nelson, too, never stopped striving for greater recognition, greater victories and greater glory.

Even as Nelson lay dying on the deck of HMS Victory in 1805, the naval leader remained fixated on what he had achieved. He was, Sandbrook says, a man consumed by a vision of greatness.