The appeal of this hugely enjoyable book lays far beyond that unusually acsribed to volumes of letters - it is a `must' for every singl member of the very lively and active Arthur Ransome Society (now numbering 1, 800) and it will be a revelation to millions more who have grown up in the last 65 years with `Swallows and Amazons'. 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.