The Last Englishman : the Double Life of Arthur Ransome - Softcover

Chambers, Roland

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571222625 ISBN 13: 9780571222629

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2010

Synopsis

Arthur Ransome was, from 1930 to the early 1960s, what J.K. Rowling is today: author of a series of children's books which shaped the imagination of a generation. Rooted in the heyday of the British Empire, Swallows and Amazons and its sequels described a nostalgic Utopia.Yet before that, Arthur Ransome was famous for different reasons. Between 1917 and 1924, as Russian correspondent for the Daily News and Manchester Guardian, he was an uncritical apologist for the Bolshevik regime, with unique access to the revolutionary leaders. As the Red Army engaged with an Allied invasion of Russia, Ransome was conducting a love affair with Evgenia Shelepina, private secretary to Leon Trotsky, then Soviet Commissar for War. As the intimate friend of Karl Radek, the Bolshevik Chief of Propaganda, he denied the Red Terror and compared Lenin to Oliver Cromwell. No English journalist was considered more controversial, or more damaging to British security. At Whitehall, he was accused of being the paid agent of a hostile power and only narrowly escaped prosecution for treason. This is a fascinating, often chilling revision of an English icon through the most formative decade of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author

Roland Chambers is a biographer and children's book author. He divides his time between London and Connecticut.

From Booklist

This sturdy biography contains some surprises for those readers who know Ransome (1884–1967) as the author of the Swallows and Amazons series of children’s books. As it turns out, Ransome was also a political journalist, a spy for the British SIS, and an outspoken defender of the Russian Revolution—all of this before he wrote the gentle children’s stories with which he is most closely associated. This is one of those biographies that succeeds on the strength of its story rather than on the liveliness of its writing, which is staid and scholarly. But the life itself is so compelling, and so unexpectedly full of intrigue, that we are kept, if not spellbound, at least too interested to put the book down. Ransome scholars and fans of the children’s series will be drawn to the book, of course, but it will also prove satisfying to readers with an interest in the period surrounding the Russian Revolution. Like American journalist John Reed, Ransome witnessed the upheaval from the inside, not merely as an observer of events but as an involved participant. --David Pitt

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0571222625
• ISBN 13: 9780571222629
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 390