Tickets: £5
Arthur Ransome was, from 1930 to the early 1960s, what J. K. Rowling is today: the much-loved author of a series of children’s books which shaped the imagination of a generation. Long before Swallows and Amazons was published, however, there had been another Arthur Ransome, famous for different reasons. Between 1917 and 1924, as Russian correspondent for the Daily News and Manchester Guardian, he was an uncritical apologist for the Bolshevik regime, and was conducting a love affair with Evgenia Shelepina, private secretary to Leon Trotsky.
Roland Chambers won a Jerwood award from the Royal Society of Literature for this book which draws on his experience both as a children’s author and as a private investigator specialising in Russian politics and business.
