WHO EVEN KNEW IT WAS A CRITICISM...:

Tom Pocock (Daily Telegraph, 10/05/2007

Tom Pocock, who died on Monday aged 81, was a popular historian and journalist devoted, above all, to the study of Nelson and his times.

Vividly recounted with an easy elegance and a shrewd eye for landscape, the best of his eight works on the great man were Horatio Nelson and The Young Nelson in the Americas. The former captured the ambition, dash and selfishness combined with a natural sympathy for his fellow men which created the legend of "the Nelson touch"; the book was a runner-up for the Whitbread Prize, and has remained in print for 20 years, despite the flood of new books which greeted the bicententary of Trafalgar in 2005.

The Young Nelson in the Americas recounted the San Juan river expedition of 1780 to Nicaragua, which had been largely ignored by earlier authors. Retracing the 21-year-old post captain's journey through steaming jungle, Pocock showed how the attempt to dislodge a Spanish garrison almost ended a career barely begun; and, like his subject, Pocock lost a shoe in the red mud as he leaped ashore. [...]

Pocock's work did not always please the critics. One professional historian (not a naval specialist) complained that he wrote in a style reminiscent of the boys' writer GM Henty; and there were sniffs from others about his failure to include references. But one speaker at an international naval historical conference pointed out that, despite the dearth of footnotes, Pocock had sold more books than all of those present put together.

....to say you write as well as Henty.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 9, 2007 9:55 PM