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“... Ransome, when he turned up, proved to be an amiable and attractive man, with a luxuriant blond soup-strainer moustache, a rubicund complexion, a large mouth from which more often than not a pipe protruded, and a hearty disposition.’ Malcolm Muggeridge immediately took to Arthur Ransome when he first met him in Cairo in 1929 ...”

“... habits a few years later, when naming one of his most effective poems ‘The Penny Whistle’. Arthur Ransome in turn may well have recalled that poem, which evokes a charcoal-burners’ camp at night, when in 1930 he had the four Walker children, his ‘Swallows’, meet the two Billies, an ancient man and his elderly son, at work in the woods above ...”

“... Sawrey and the dale of Newlands, settles there finally and specialises in native breeds of sheep. Arthur Ransome writes stories set in Coniston (and elsewhere) and inspires me and many thousands of other children with tales about families learning to camp and sail and climb and skate and smelt copper. Such for Thompson are the prime markers in the ...”

“... and Ipswich. On its southern shore, halfway between the two towns, is Pin Mill, a village where Arthur Ransome lived. The inn at Pin Mill is called the Butt and Oyster: through its windows you see boats that at low tide rest on the sandy, seaweed-covered shore. Some of them are flat-bottomed Thames barges, the type of sailing boat that once traded ...”

“... influenza sweeping through postwar Europe. ‘England may seem to you untouched,’ Lenin warned Arthur Ransome, ‘but the microbe is already there.’ It turned out, of course, that in Europe Fascism succeeded where Communism failed. Mayer’s conclusions may not have fully withstood the criticism directed against them, but his more general concern ...”

“... in the war. In Moscow, he formed a close alliance with the American Raymond Robins and a young Arthur Ransome, far the best-informed foreign correspondent in the country. Robins, a personal envoy of Woodrow Wilson’s, urged full recognition of the Bolshevik regime. Ransome, who knew the team around Lenin and had ...”

“... were given titbits to eat by their Irish tenants, who felt sorry for them. Like children in an Arthur Ransome or C.S. Lewis novel, they rambled unnoticed around the great house and were given to taking off on their bicycles up the main road to the nearby town. It is well known in the world of fairytale and post-Freudian analysis that it is not a good ...”

“... sons and grandsons of William Wordsworth were still prominent in the local community, and where Arthur Ransome was a frequent visitor to the Collingwood family home. Inglis, in fact, hazards a guess that R.G. was the inspiration for the elder brother, John Walker, in Ransome’s We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea. True or ...”

“... Inglis begins unequivocally, ‘are Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Arthur Ransome, William Mayne and Philippa Pearce.’) What they may be charged with is not treating this fact with the seriousness it deserves: not, indeed, considering even the possibility that it might be wise to revise the whole view of fiction in its ...”

“... my pocket money went on books – Billy Bunter, Jennings, William, War Picture Library, Biggles, Arthur Ransome, bird books. In the 1950s I used to order Puffin books by post from the catalogue, the pleasure of unwrapping the parcel rivalling the discovery of a new book in a Christmas stocking. For my ninth or tenth birthday I asked for a glass-fronted ...”

“... to their own devices’, doing the sorts of thing that would later be re-created by their friend Arthur Ransome in Swallows and Amazons. Collingwood remembered exploring the countryside on foot or by bike or in a little boat called Swallow, learning to recognise plants, rocks, wildlife and stars. He would also accompany his father on increasingly ...”

“... The Ransomes had been burgled. ‘Robbed,’ Mrs Ransome said. ‘Burgled,’ Mr Ransome corrected. Premises were burgled; persons were robbed. Mr Ransome was a solicitor by profession and thought words mattered. Though ‘burgled’ was the wrong word too ...”

“... move up a class was tested by their ability to swim the Avon fully clothed, write a critique of an Arthur Ransome book, climb the Tracker Tree, or spend a night alone in the woods and write about the experience. Classes were voluntary: a young radio buff who had chosen not to learn arithmetic finally begged the music master to teach him long division so ...”

“... he was. His diaries from that time record enthusiasms for the novels of J.M. Barrie and Arthur Ransome, for Emil and the Detectives and The Sword in the Stone. And he was much pre-occupied with writing a string quartet about his schooldays, with movements given titles like ‘P.T.’ and ‘Ragging’. His emotional life centred on his ...”

“... life. Others would be too good-mannered to notice things which embarrass Adrian. In the world of Arthur Ransome’s children parents hardly figure as characters. Their role is to establish the absolute security outside the plot which can make the adventures within it seem both realistic and safe. No possible turn of a ...”