The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure, edited by Lawrence Ellsworth

My wife found me this gem: a thick collection of swashbuckling tales from several masters of the field - many of them unknown to me until now. You can find all of the big names here, from Alexandre Dumas and Baroness Orczy to Rafael Sabatini, but also some less well known names such as Stanley J. Feyman and Anthony Hope. Pirates, swordsmen, nobles - you can find it all here. It is pretty impossible to review an entire collection of stories from so many authors: a lot depends on the quality of the individual stories and they are still all of them unique and would deserve a separate paragraph of their own. I don't have time such a deep review, unfortunately, but I will try to give you my overall impression.

Review: The First Sir Percy by Baroness Orczy

It's been a while since I reviewed Emmuska Orczy's The Laughing Cavalier. The First Sir Percy is a sequel that picks up the events very soon after the end of the first volume. Set in March, 1624, it explores the events that surrounded the Spanish invasion of that year, although this serves mostly as a setting and most of the action is based on a single location.

My Top Five Reads of 2016

Another year gone and another pile of books read. In fact, I find that I read about 80 books last year, a good portion of them graphic novels, to be sure, amounting to c. 19500 pages. Picking the five best reads from this pile is not easy. Actually it would be, if I was willing to fill the entire list with Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels. But since that would make for a dull list, I will only give one spot of the five to that, most excellent of novel series.

Review: The Laughing Cavalier by Emmuska Orczy

Emmuska Orczy is best known for the The Scarlet Pimpernel novels (and plays and films) that are set in the 18th century Britain and France. However, she wrote two novels depicting an ancestor of her famous hero set in the 1624 Netherlands, the first of which is called The Laughing Cavalier - named after the famous painting by Frans Hals (see the title image) that Orczy claims depicts the hero himself. The hero goes around under the pseudonym of Diogones and is part of a group of three mercenaries who call themselves the Philosophers.