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“... ability to use smart writing to make a teen plot seem a true account of the place she grew up in. Patrick O’Brian’s stories of Napoleonic sea war have a vivacity which Hugh Thomas’s more fitfully imaginative book lacks, but both have virtues which come directly from the fact that the substantial historical scaffolds which they have erected give ...”

“... I suspect that there has been a continuous tradition from the great Victorians right through to ...”

“... particularly prone to re-create their own lives.’ Among recently exposed fantasists, he lists Patrick O’Brian, Bruce Chatwin, Laurie Lee and Jeffrey Archer, all writers for whom a legend as man of action was a large part of their stock in trade. The South African poet Roy Campbell, who was a world-class liar, influenced Van der Post at an ...”

“... Simone de Beauvoir had to change her original title for When things of the spirit come first, because it had been unexpectedly pre-empted by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The new title which she picked (Quand prime le spirituel) was a simple variant of the other (Primauté du Spirituel), and the difference has in any case become insignificant in the English translation ...”

“... bear an odd resemblance to popular naval romances of our own time, like those of C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian; for poetry in the 17th century was expected to cater for all a public’s literary appetites, and usually did so very well, whether it was war in Heaven or bombardment on the high seas. Sylvester’s version of the French poet Du Bartas is ...”

“... and documentary evidence: a triumph of rubber and tweed underpinned by collegiate spirit and, as Patrick O’Brian wrote in the LRB, ‘that fine zeal and conviction which arises from original research’. It might have been called definitive, but, as this superb new edition reminds us, history never sleeps, and nor does the sea. Evidence from the ...”

“... I didn’t kick him hard enough’). Occasionally, he’s a little coy. His chauffeur, Patrick, sold his story about the Redlands drug bust to the News of the World, and Keith explains: ‘Didn’t do him any good. As I heard it, he never walked the same again.’ He always goes about with a knife and admits: ‘I have to say I was using guns too ...”

“... Spain. (Some distant booms and cannon shots from this episode may be found in the later novels of Patrick O’Brian.) Is it too fanciful to see a common and self-consciously phlegmatic character as well? Chile is divided almost as surely from its continental neighbours, by the spine of the Andes, as is Britain by the Channel. The outlook is maritime: the ...”

“... the dying days of the Ancien Régime. Jane’s sailor-brother Captain Frank Austen reports in the Patrick O’Brian style on the high point of his naval career when, off St Domingo on 6 February 1806, his ship Canopus gave a French three-decker ‘a tickling which knocked all his sticks away’. Where there’s insufficient material Nokes returns to ...”

“... through correspondence with people she never met or hadn’t seen for years. (Among them was Patrick O’Brian, another writer in flight from England, who dedicated his fourth Aubrey-Maturin novel, The Mauritius Command, to her.) Otherwise, she had little interest in the literary world. When she encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the ...”

“... mobility having stalled – a phenomenon which none of the books mentions. In one of his novels, Patrick O’Brian has his character Stephen Maturin say: ‘Have you ever known a village reputation to be wrong?’ Cherie (I’m going to call her that to avoid confusion with the other Blair) has a village reputation which stresses her ambivalent ...”

“... on (though there may continue to be minor alarums, such as the recent spat over the entry for Patrick O’Brian). Nonetheless, a not dissimilar kind of sleep-disturbing responsibility fell on its editor, and the project was fortunate to find the ideal man for the job in the Oxford historian Colin Matthew, who had demonstrated his capacity for the ...”

“... poured – and still pour – off the presses, from C.S. Forester through Dennis Wheatley to Patrick O’Brian. Over time, this output has yielded a teeming universe that can be glimpsed in such omnibus guides as What Historical Novel Do I Read Next?, with its capsule descriptions of more than 6000 titles, and league tables of the most popular ...”