Posted by Mike Dennis on August 09, 2019 at 01:26:12 user MTD.
In Reply to: Re: Hugh Brogan posted by Mike Dennis on August 08, 2019 at 03:36:35:
Firstly my apologies for typing errors in my previoud posts, since my stroke earlier this year recovery is going well but using a kayboard is sometimes still tricky!
There is an excellent obituary of Hugh Brogan in the London Times today (9th August) but again is behind a paywall. Here is the opening paragraphs which give an insight in to how he came to write AR's biography unknown to me.
Like many of his generation, Hugh Brogan grew up with Swallows and Amazons, enjoying Arthur Ransome’s tales of John, Bridget, Titty, Roger and Susan, and their adventures in the Lake District. However, it was as a historian that he returned to Ransome because of his interest in the author’s role as an observer and chronicler of the Russian revolution, and as husband to Evgenia, Trotsky’s personal secretary.
His renewed interest was triggered one evening in 1974 when, after a somewhat bibulous dinner at his Cambridge college, Brogan retired to the senior common room. “I was reading the paper when I came across a review of the film of Swallows and Amazons in which Arthur Ransome was dismissed as an old Tory writing ridiculous and reactionary stories about children,” he told The Times in 1984 at the time of the author’s centenary. “My blood boiled . . . I sat down and wrote to Ransome’s publishers that this was absurd.”
The correspondence ended up with Evgenia, who was so impressed that anyone should feel sufficiently moved to defend her husband that she invited the young academic to become his biographer.
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