Description
8vo, XII, 304pp. Hardcover in attractive blue/grey cloth with silver titling and royal blue background on spine in excellent condition with slightly bruised corners and edges only and with a price-clipped paper backed d/w in good condition with moderate chipping to all edges and corners. Spine is tight and firm and d/w is now protected by clear archival covering. text is in excellent condition with all illustrations intact and devoid of any extraneous markings, so overall it is an excellent copy. This is an amazingly constructed pseudo-biography of C.S. Forester’s fictional character, Horatio Hornblower.He is not a real officer but is the amalgamation of several naval officers experiences gleaned from detailed study of past reports and notes. Forester wrote twelve books covering the adventures of Admiral Lord Hornblower. Eleven of these covered his career from 1794, when he joined the Royal Navy, to 1823 , when he ended his three years in the West Indies. The twelfth book, The Hornblower Companion, contains the author’s account of how these notable books came to be written. Dr Northcote Parkinson, is among other things a noted naval historian of the Napoleanic period, and he has noticed gaps and shadowy areas in the portrait painted by C.S. Forester and hence set himself to fill them with wit, respect and impeccable scholarship.