Writer and lecturer
Islington, London
Joined January 2009
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My new book on Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit' - written with Cronain O'Kelly amazon.co.uk/Hegels-Phenomen…
James Heartfield retweeted
hearing for the first time that novelist Patrick O'Brian (of _Master & Commander_ fame) invented much of his own biography,
didn't know how to sail & had no practical experience doing it, wasn't Anglo-Irish gentry but rather English working class, barely educated, concealed his early marriage...
Everything he learned about sailing & the 19th c was from obsessive research & reading books.
O'Brian comes out to be a far more puzzling, eccentric, twisted, anachronistic figure who lived in isolation on a small hobby farm in France, deeply secretive, insecure, brooding, exiled, aloof, yet TOTALLY COMMITTED TO THE BIT.
I like him even more now (am currently reading Master & Commander)
