Escape Artist, Joseph McAleer
Escape Artist, Joseph McAleer
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Escape Artist
The Nine Lives of Harry Perry Robinson

Author: Joseph McAleer

Narrator: Matthew Lloyd Davies

Unabridged: 15 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/01/2020


Synopsis

The life of Sir Harry Perry Robinson (1859–1930) unfolds like a Boy's Own adventure. Born in India and educated at Oxford, Harry fled to the United States to make his name and fortune. After a stint in the gold mines of the American West, he became a major force in the railroad industry and helped to elect a US president. Returning to England, Harry had a celebrated career as a book publisher and as a journalist for the Times, serving as the oldest correspondent during the First World War and going on to have one of the scoops of the century: the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1923.

Harry's journey unfolds against the background of his equally adventurous and accomplished family. His father, Julian, was an Indian Army chaplain and newspaper editor. His brother Philip was a dashing foreign correspondent, arrested as a spy during the Spanish-American War. Brother Edward ("Kay") gave Rudyard Kipling his first writing job. And troubled sister Valence was rumored to end her days living in a barrel on a roadside in Bulawayo.

From the White House to Buckingham Palace, the American West to the Western Front, the sands of Egypt to the shores of India, Harry was a master of reinvention. His innate wanderlust was both a blessing and a curse, but it made for a splendid adventure, and Harry's was a grand life lived in history's shadow.

About Joseph McAleer

Joseph McAleer's books include Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914-1950, which received the inaugural Longmans History Today Book of the Year Award; Passion's Fortune: The Story of Mills & Boon; and Call of the Atlantic: Jack London's Publishing Odyssey Overseas, 1902-1916. A Connecticut Yankee with a doctorate from Oxford, he has held a variety of interesting jobs, including college professor, administrator of the Hawthornden Castle Literary Institute, corporate PR head, spokesman for the Roman Catholic Church, publisher, and national film critic.


Reviews

An absorbing book about an enterprising writer with talent and dynamism. Loved reading about the time he spent in the gold fields, about his descriptions of events and places in France during World War 1 and about his experiences as the official reporter at the scene when Tutankhamun’s tomb was open......more