Signalling From Mars

"Hugh Brogan writes in his Introduction- `Ransome in large part lived through his correspondence.

He wrote letters as easily as we make phone calls (He did not possess a telephone until he was in his fifties).

Their language is still vital with his character. Hundreds survive and add up to a literary achievement that deserves to be put in print as much as his stories for children.

We seem to come especially close to the man writing. . . and because of the letters'spontaneity, I have let them compose themselves into a portrait of the writer in all his boyisness, his energy, his intellegence, his geniality (and his fretfulness)and the immense variety of his skills and interests'.

Brogan says he has `tried to be as light-hearted an editor as possible producing `a reader-friendly selection rather than a definitive edition of documents'.

He begins with Ransome in St Petersburg at the start of the Great War in 1914, and includes a breif commentary as well as some of the drawings with which Ransome decorated his correspondance."