Sir Rupert Charles Hart-Davis was an English publisher and editor. He founded the publishing company Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd. As a biographer, he is remembered for his Hugh Walpole (1952), as an editor, for his Collected Letters of Oscar Wilde (1962), and, as both editor and part-author, for the Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters.
Arthur Michell Ransome was an English author and journalist. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The entire series remains in print, and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake.
The Swallows and Amazons series is a series of twelve children's adventure novels by English author Arthur Ransome. Set in the interwar period, the novels involve group adventures by children, mainly in the school holidays and mainly in England. They revolve around outdoor activities, especially sailing. Literary critic Peter Hunt believes it "changed British literature, affected a whole generation's view of holidays, helped to create the national image of the English Lake District and added Arthur Ransome's name to the select list of classic British children's authors." The series remains popular and inspires visits to the Lake District and Norfolk Broads, where many of the books are set.
Jonathan Cape is a London publishing firm founded in 1921 by Herbert Jonathan Cape (1879–1960), who was head of the firm until his death.
Robert Hugh Benson AFSC KC*SG KGCHS was an English Catholic priest and writer. First an Anglican priest, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1903 and ordained therein the next year. He was also a prolific writer of fiction, writing the notable dystopian novel Lord of the World, as well as Come Rack! Come Rope!.
Dodd, Mead and Company was one of the pioneer publishing houses of the United States, based in New York City. Under several names, the firm operated from 1839 until 1990.
Great Northern? is the twelfth and final completed book of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of children's books. It was published in 1947. In this book, the three families of major characters in the series, the Swallows, the Amazons and the Ds, are all reunited in a book for the first time since Pigeon Post. This book is set in the Outer Hebrides and the two familiar Ransome themes of sailing and ornithology come to the fore.
Swallows and Amazons is a children's adventure novel by English author Arthur Ransome and first published on 21 July 1930 by Jonathan Cape. Set in the summer of 1929 in the Lake District, the book introduces the main characters of John, Susan, Titty and Roger Walker (Swallows); as well as their mother, Mary; and their baby sister, Bridget. We also meet Nancy and Peggy Blackett (Amazons); their uncle Jim, commonly referred to as Captain Flint; and their widowed mother, Molly Blackett. It is the first book in the Swallows and Amazons series, followed by Swallowdale.
Coots in the North is the name given by Arthur Ransome's biographer, Hugh Brogan, to an incomplete Swallows and Amazons novel found in Ransome's papers. Brogan edited and published the first few chapters as a fragment with a selection of Ransome's other short stories in 1988. The story starts in the Broads but continues in the Lake District after the Death and Glories hitch a ride aboard a boat being delivered to the Lake in the North.
Roger Edward Collingwood Altounyan (1922–1987) was an Anglo-Armenian physician and pharmacologist who pioneered the use of sodium cromoglycate as a remedy for asthma. His family relocated to the United Kingdom where he studied medicine and started his pioneering research.
Michael Joseph was a British publisher and writer.
Denis Hugh Vercingetorix Brogan known as Hugh Brogan, was a British historian and biographer.
Peel Island is one of the three islands of Coniston Water in the English Lake District, Cumbria. The two others are Fir Island and Oak Island. It is most famous for being one of the inspirations for Arthur Ransome's Wild Cat Island. Today, it is a popular tourist destination, and belongs to the National Trust.
The Far-Distant Oxus is a 1937 British children’s novel by Katharine Hull (1921–1977) and Pamela Whitlock (1920–1982), written while they were still children themselves. The title is taken from Matthew Arnold's poem Sohrab and Rustum, and the characters in the story choose names from it for the places around them in the north coast of Devon; the real Oxus is a river in Central Asia.
Nancy Blackett is a fictional character in nine of the twelve juvenile novels in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of books. She acts as captain of the dinghy, Amazon and usually directing her friends in their various adventures. Nancy apparently has no real-world counterpart as an inspirational source for Ransome but appears to be completely the author's creation. Nancy is sometimes critically viewed as a subversive character for girl readers. The character appeared in a 1963 BBC television adaptation of Swallows and Amazons as well as in the 1974 and 2016 film adaptations of the book.
Thomas William Hodgson Crosland was a British author, poet and journalist.
Charles Granville was an English book publisher, publishing in the 1900s and early 1910s as Stephen Swift or Stephen Swift Ltd. He published two literary magazines, the Oxford and Cambridge Review and the Eye Witness, which carried works by "up and coming" literary authors, and also a third, Rhythm. In October 1912 he was wanted for embezzlement and bigamy, and fled the country. He was brought back, tried, and imprisoned for bigamy. His publishing company was liquidated.
Old Peter's Russian Tales is a collection of Russian folk-tales retold by Arthur Ransome, published in Britain in 1916.
Racundra's First Cruise is the first book about sailing written by Arthur Ransome, author of the Swallows and Amazons series. It describes a trip he made across the Baltic Sea from Riga in Latvia to Helsinki in Finland and back in a 9 metre sailing boat that he had built.
Swallows and Amazons is a 1963 BBC children's television series based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Arthur Ransome, about the holiday adventures of two groups of children, the Swallows (Walkers) and the Amazons (Blacketts), sailing on a lake and camping on an island in the Lake District in the 1930s.
