This is probably (although I'm only halfway through the series so may have to change my mind) the most dramatic and the most emotional of the Swallows and Amazons books, but everything is beautifully put into perspective by Captain Walker. But this was a book written in the time before young people had the attention span of a gnat, and actually everything in the first half of the book is important to the second half of the book. I daresay there will be the usual bunch of reviewers moaning that it took too long to get going. Yes, dammit, this time I'm finishing the sentence. Surely the best children's book ever written.

All remain in print and have been widely translated.Īrthur Ransome died in June 1967 and is buried at Rusland in the Lake District. Today Ransome is best known for his Swallows and Amazons series of novels, (1931 - 1947). Settling in the Lake District, he spent the late 1920s as a foreign correspondent and highly-respected angling columnist for the Manchester Guardian, before settling down to write Swallows and Amazons and its successors. Ransome married Evgenia and returned to England in 1924. These contacts led to persistent but unproven accusations that he 'spied' for both the Bolsheviks and Britain. He knew many of the leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin, Radek, Trotsky and the latter's secretary, Evgenia Shvelpina. Petersburg, where he was ideally placed to observe and report on the Russian Revolution. He used this precarious existence to practice writing, producing several minor works before Bohemia in London (1907), a study of London's artistic scene and his first significant book.Īn interest in folklore, together with a desire to escape an unhappy first marriage, led Ransome to St. In 1902, Ransome abandoned a chemistry degree to become a publisher's office boy in London. Arthur Michell Ransome (Janu– June 3, 1967) was an English author and journalist.

Arthur ransome author