About Arthur Ransome
Arthur Michell Ransome (18 January 1884 – 3 June 1967) was an English author, intelligence agent, and journalist. He is best known for writing and illustrating the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books about the school-holiday adventures of children, mostly in the Lake District and the Norfolk Broads. The entire series remains in print, and Swallows and Amazons is the basis for a tourist industry around Windermere and Coniston Water, the two lakes Ransome adapted as his fictional North Country lake. He also wrote about the literary life of London, and about Russia before, during, and after the revolutions of 1917. His connection with the leaders of the Revolution led to him providing information to the Secret Intelligence Service, while he was also suspected by MI5 of being a Soviet spy. In his first important book, Bohemia in London (1907), Ransome introduced the history of the city's Bohemian literary and artistic communities and some of its current representatives. Ransome won the suit, supported by Robbie Ross, the editor of De Profundis. Ransome had also been working on a similar literary biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, but that was abandoned with the manuscript in the first draft and not rediscovered until 1999.
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