Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
It’s a ripping yarn, it’s just so exciting. He really invented a new way of writing about international affairs. It was incredibly influential. It had a profound political effect because it pointed up the fears about Britain being unprepared for war with Germany. It combines derring-do, open air and a kind of lovely, thumping sense of duty that is very British as well. It sets the tone for an awful lot of what follows.
What about The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers. Is that really the first of the genre, would you say?
Well, there’s some debate about it, but I think it is. It’s a ripping yarn, it’s just so exciting. I first read it when I was about ten, and I’ve re-read it periodically since and it combines two of the things that I love most. It’s a great thriller, but it’s also brilliant about sailing. And it was written tremendously early – it was published in 1903. He really invented a new way of writing about international affairs.
It was incredibly influential. It had a profound political effect because it pointed up the fears about Britain being unprepared for war with Germany. The essential plot is about a man who stumbles across a German plan to invade Britain and it woke up a generation to the fears of German militarism. It’s terrifically old-fashioned in lots of ways: the main character is called Carruthers! I sometimes wonder what happened to those people called Carruthers, Cholmondeley and Montague with their long moustaches, who fought the good fight. I suspect the answer is they didn’t breed very much.
And they died in the First World War.
Yes, and those who were left died in the Second World War. But it combines derring-do, open air and a kind of lovely, thumping sense of duty that is very British as well. It sets the tone for an awful lot of what follows. I don’t think we’d have had James Bond in quite the same way if we hadn’t had Carruthers first.
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Ben Macintyre is Writer at Large and Associate Editor on The Times and writes a weekly column on history, espionage, art, politics and foreign affairs. He is the author of seven non-fiction history books, including his latest, Operation Mincemeat: The True Spy Story that changed the course of World War II. Here he tells one of the great unsung stories of WWII: after cracking the Enigma code, the British knew when virtually every single German spy was coming. ‘They were all picked up and offered a pretty stark choice between collaborating or execution. The unlucky 14 chose trial and execution. The rest all agreed to be double agents, and this was a critical part of the war.’
