Arthur Ransome began to fish as a boy in the Lake District, but the pursuit became almost an obsession when he lived in Russia during World War I and reported the Revolution and its aftermath for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian. When he returned to England with Trotsky's secretary as his wife, he settled in Lakeland and began his four-year weekly column Rod and Line for the Guardian, stopping only to write the twelve Swallows and Amazons books for children which made him famous. Although he published a few of these and other fishing essays in two books, Rod and Line and Mainly about Fishing, most of his writing and broadcasting on the subject has never appeared in book form. Jeremy Swift's book not only tells for the first time of Ransome's fishing adventures - in exotic places with men of history or by small English streams with unknown, eccentric fellow countrymen - but it rescues many of Ransome's fishing articles from the oblivion of the archive shelf.