Category: Literature

It’s very muddling. Auguste Dupin and Arsène Lupin are both French gentlemen thieves (like Raffles and perhaps Simon Templar) created by Edgar Allen Poe and Maurice Leblanc respectively. Lupin has possibilities and there are plenty of short stories and novels, if I get hooked. Meanwhile, let’s start with the beginning of the first chapter of… Continue reading Arsène Lupin

General Raymond E Lee is largely forgotten so just the man to be re-discovered. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry, an omission that should be rectified. He was US Military Attaché in London in WW II. I have ordered his London Journal.

John Bayley, Charlton Heston and William Waldegrave have something in common. They are all contributors to Patrick O’Brian – Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography. That gives a hint about the range of PO’Bs readers. The Hundred Days (1998), is the penultimate novel in the Aubrey/Maturin series. Here is how it opens.

Francis Haskell was at Eton in WW II.

Anthony Price has been a great find. I had never heard of him because he has slipped out of fashion like so many writers of his generation in his genre.

When the first of these things happened, that is to say upon the twentieth day of April, 192-, I was twenty-two years old, a little stronger than most men of my age, and very ready for anything that bade fair to prove more exciting than entering the office of my uncle, who was a merchant… Continue reading Blind Corner