Fisher’s Face; or,: Getting to Know the Admiral

Upon seeing a photograph of Lord Admiral Jack Fisher’s face for the first time in 1950, Jan Morris was taken by a countenance of “extraordinary arrogance, superciliousness, humor, kindness and effrontery.” If one were to guess the profession of the sitter, she suggests it might perhaps be “a character actor, a cardinal, an entrepreneur of the old velvet-collared kind, a tycoon or possibly an overhyped chef.” But this was the Victorian Age commander of the Queen’s Navy, at once a ribald seaman, dance lover and voracious Bible reader, and he made an indelible impression upon Morris’s heart. Fisher’s Face is a love affair forty-five years in the making, a brilliant biography that serves as a cultural and historical link between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and gives us a fascinating glimpse into as enigmatic a figure as England ever produced – a devout churchgoer and man of both mercurial humor and great violence. Jan Morris animates history by painting a captivating, novelistic portrait of one of the best-known sailors of his day, a man who single-handedly brought the sluggish British Navy into the twentieth century.