On a trip to the local library, many years ago now, my dad was asked by a kindly but rather severe librarian if I was really allowed to borrow one of the Ramage books, as they were from the section for grown-ups and I was only about 11. The old man nodded assent and so I went home with, if memory serves, Ramage and the Renegades .

For the uninitiated, the series, by Dudley Pope, follows the adventures of Royal Navy officer Lord Nicholas Ramage in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. They don’t have the painstaking attention to detail and literary brilliance of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, and they are usually more light-hearted and breezy than the Hornblower and Bolitho novels, whose heroes tend towards self-doubt and melancholy. But they are rollicking good fun, ide

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