"It is often forgotten that Ransome was forty-five when he began writing his most famous books, and that the most interesting episode of his life, from a biographer’s point of view, was already over. Between 1913 and 1914, he lived in Russia and the Baltic States, working as a correspondent first for the Daily News and then for the Manchester Guardian. The author of Swallows and Amazons had seen the March Revolution of 1917 with his own eyes, and following the Bolshevik coup in November, became one of a tiny number of foreign journalists granted access to the new Soviet government. During the first years of Bolshevik rule, he had retained close contact with the Kremlin, in spite of the liquidation of a British conspiracy headed by one of his closest associates, an Allied invasion, and a suspicion that Ransome himself was working as a British spy. . . . "