Posted by Duncan on March 16, 2005 at 11:37:17 from 195.93.21.2 user Duncan.
In Reply to: Re: Another Ransome article in the Guardian posted by Adam Quinan on March 10, 2005 at 03:19:23:
There's an awful lot to follow up from the article, actually.
a) A certain utopianism or romanticism is consistent with a Ruskinian/Morrisian socialism, not contrary to it (for a huge number of reasons that I can't go into now).
b) That actually Ransome subverts the romantic tradition of children's literature in a number of ways, but not in ways that undermine part a (!)
c) We have access to lots of letters Ransome wrote in Stockholm in 1918. What light do these letters shine on this question of Ransome being 'recruited' by SIS that summer?
d) If - as one SIS claim runs, in the newly-released MI5 papers - Ransome only befriended bolsheviks at the direct instructions of SIS, how come other evidence has him being recruited in 1918 (long after he had befriended bolsheviks, and written approvingly of them)? What reasons could exist for somebody insisting that AR's connection with the Bolsheviks was all at the instructions of British intelligence?
e) If some of the intelligence information is wrong - and, as far as one can tell, deliberately misleading (for whatever reasons we might choose, in answering the questions in d) - how can we trust any of it?
I could and probably will rattle on, but I'll stop now!
Duncan