Books with author Rafael Sabatini

Further adventures from the much-loved Captain Blood, the 'Robin Hood' of the Spanish Seas. In his latest exploits, The Chronicles of Captain Blood takes him to new adventures with as much excitement and swashbuckling adventure as ever before. Winning invaluable treasures, rescuing his crew from almost certain death and saving an English settlement are all in a day's work for this remarkable hero of land and sea.

Sabatini was a proponent of basing historical fiction as closely as possible on history. Although Blood is a fictional character, much of the historical background of the novel is based on fact. The Monmouth rebels were sold into slavery as described in the book; and the shifting political alliances of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 are used in the novel as a plot device to allow Blood's return to respectability.Sabatini based the first part of the story of Blood on Henry Pitman, a surgeon who tended the wounded Monmouth rebels and was sentenced to death by Judge Jeffreys, but whose sentence was commuted to penal transportation to Barbados where he escaped and was captured by pirates. Unlike the fictional Blood, Pitman did not join them, and eventually made his way back to England where he wrote a popular account of his adventures. For Blood's life as a buccaneer, Sabatini used several models, including Henry Morgan and the work of Alexandre Exquemelin, for historical details.Sabatini first introduced the character Captain Blood in a series of eight short stories in Premier Magazine as Tales of the Brethren of the Main, published from December 1920 to March 1921, and reprinted in Adventure Magazine from January to May 1921, with a novella "Captain Blood's Dilemma", published in Premier Magazine in April 1921 (and Adventure Magazine in October 1921).[a] The Odyssey-like story arc of these tales was then woven by Sabatini into a continuous narrative in novel form, published as Captain Blood: His Odyssey in 1922.

Captain Blood: His Odyssey is an adventure novel by Rafael Sabatini, originally published in 1922.The protagonist is the sharp-witted Dr. Peter Blood, a fictional Irish physician who had had a wide-ranging career as a soldier and sailor (including a commission as a captain under the Dutch admiral De Ruyter) before settling down to practice medicine in the town of Bridgwater in Somerset.The book opens with him attending to his geraniums while the town prepares to fight for James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth. He wants no part in the rebellion, but while attending to some of the rebels wounded at the Battle of Sedgemoor, Peter is arrested. During the Bloody Assizes, he is convicted by the infamous Judge Jeffreys of treason on the grounds that "if any person be in actual rebellion against the King, and another person—who really and actually was not in rebellion—does knowingly receive, harbour, comfort, or succour him, such a person is as much a traitor as he who indeed bore arms."The sentence for treason is death by hanging, but King James II, for purely financial reasons, has the sentence for Blood and other convicted rebels commuted to transportation to the Caribbean, where they are to be sold into slavery. Upon arrival on the island of Barbados, Blood is bought by Colonel William Bishop, initially for work in the Colonel's sugar plantations but later hired out by Bishop when Blood's skills as a physician prove superior to those of the local doctors. During his period of slavery, Blood becomes acquainted with and even friendly with Arabella Bishop, Colonel Bishop's niece, who becomes sympathetic after learning his history.When a Spanish force attacks and raids the town of Bridgetown, Blood escapes with a number of other convict-slaves (including former shipmaster Jeremy Pitt, the one-eyed giant Edward Wolverstone, former gentleman Nathaniel Hagthorpe, former Royal Navy petty officer Nicholas Dyke and former Royal Navy master gunner Ned Ogle), captures the Spaniards' ship and sails away to become one of the most successful pirates in the Caribbean, hated and feared by the Spanish and always sparing English ships. Colonel Bishop, humiliated by Blood's escape and by Blood himself, devotes himself to capturing Blood with the hope of hanging him.After the Glorious Revolution, Blood is pardoned. As a reward for saving the colony of Jamaica from a French assault, he is appointed its governor in place of Colonel Bishop, who had abandoned his post to hunt for Blood, and the novel ends with the implication that Blood will not only marry Colonel Bishop's niece Arabella but will also let Bishop off easy.

Captain Blood is one of the great pirate stories. First published in 1922, Rafael Sabatini’s novel has never been out of print. It was the basis for the hit Warner Bros. movie Captain Blood (1935), starring Errol Flynn. Although Blood is a fictional character, much of the historical background of the novel is based on fact. Blood is loosely based on Henry Pitman, a surgeon who tended the wounded Monmouth rebels and was sentenced to penal transportation to Barbados where he escaped and was captured by pirates. Unlike the fictional Blood, Pitman did not join them, and eventually made his way back to England where he wrote a popular account of his adventures. For Blood's life as a buccaneer, author Rafael Sabatini used several models, including Henry Morgan and the work of Alexandre Exquemelin, for historical details.

This is no Chronicle of Saints. Nor yet is it a History of Devils. It is a record of certain very human, strenuous men in a very human, strenuous age; a lustful, flamboyant age; an age red with blood and pale with passion at white-heat; an age of steel and velvet, of vivid colour, dazzling light and impenetrable shadow; an age of swift movement, pitiless violence and high endeavour, of sharp antitheses and amazing contrasts.To judge it from the standpoint of this calm, deliberate, and correct century—as we conceive our own to be—is for sedate middle-age to judge from its own standpoint the reckless, hot, passionate, lustful humours of youth, of youth that errs grievously and achieves greatly.So to judge that epoch collectively is manifestly wrong, a hopeless procedure if it be our aim to understand it and to be in sympathy with it, as it becomes broad-minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and we waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as may pursue the study of us.But if it be wrong to judge a past epoch collectively by the standards of our own time, how much more is it not wrong to single out individuals for judgement by those same standards, after detaching them for the purpose from the environment in which they had their being? How false must be the conception of them thus obtained! We view the individuals so selected through a microscope of modern focus. They appear monstrous and abnormal, and we straight-way assume them to be monsters and abnormalities, never considering that the fault is in the adjustment of the instrument through which we inspect them, and that until that is corrected others of that same past age, if similarly viewed, must appear similarly distorted.Hence it follows that some study of an age must ever prelude and accompany the study of its individuals, if comprehension is to wait upon our labours. To proceed otherwise is to judge an individual Hottentot or South Sea Islander by the code of manners that obtains in Belgravia or Mayfair.Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it; and in the literature of the Cinquecento you shall behold for the looking the ardent, unmoral, naïve soul of this Renaissance that was sprawling in its lusty, naked infancy and bellowing hungrily for the pap of knowledge, and for other things. You shall infer something of the passionate mettle of this infant: his tempestuous mirth, his fierce rages, his simplicity, his naïveté, his inquisitiveness, his cunning, his deceit, his cruelty, his love of sunshine and bright gewgaws.To realize him as he was, you need but to bethink you that this was the age in which the Decamerone of Giovanni Boccaccio, the Facetiae of Poggio, the Satires of Filelfo, and the Hermaphroditus of Panormitano afforded reading-matter to both sexes. This was the age in which the learned and erudite Lorenzo Valla—of whom more anon—wrote his famous indictment of virginity, condemning it as against nature with arguments of a most insidious logic. This was the age in which Casa, Archbishop of Benevento, wrote a most singular work of erotic philosophy, which, coming from a churchman’s pen, will leave you cold with horror should you chance to turn its pages. This was the age of the Discovery of Man; the pagan age which stripped Christ of His divinity to bestow it upon Plato, so that Marsilio Ficino actually burnt an altar-lamp before an image of the Greek by whose teachings—in common with so many scholars of his day—he sought to inform himself.

Scaramouche is a romantic adventure and it tells the story of a young lawyer during the French Revolution. In the course of his adventures he becomes an actor portraying "Scaramouche" (a roguish buffoon character in the commedia dell'arte). He also becomes a revolutionary, politician, and fencing-master, confounding his enemies with his powerful orations and swordsmanship. He is forced by circumstances to change sides several times.

With swordfights and romance, adventure and treachery set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, this is the book that made Sabatini famous. André-Louis Moreau has good prospects as a young lawyer, but an unfair duel with the ruthlessly cruel Count de La Tour d'Azyr leaves André-Louis's best friend dead and André-Louis himself a fugitive from the King's justice. While incognito, he becomes both a wildly popular actor and a firebrand of the Revolution. His vow to avenge his friend's murder leads him deeper into the political intrigues that surround the Revolution, and to a position of power. But there are secrets to be revealed that will stun all of Paris.One of the best historical romances of all time, Scaramouche was a bestseller upon its original publication in the U.S. in 1921.

London 1665 is no place for Randal Holles, a former soldier in Cromwell’s army, now that the monarchy has been restored and the exploits of the Republicans are being condemned in the highest degree. Holles, desperate for an escape from his hopeless situation and almost certain execution, sees no option but to accept the Duke of Wellington’s rather dubious commission – to abduct a famous actress and bring her before him. However, as events take an unexpected turn, Holles is presented with the opportunity to be reinstated to his former glory.The Author: Rafael Sabatini was born on 29 April 1875 in Jesi, Italy, the only son of Maestro-Cavaliere Vincenzo Sabatini and his English wife, Anna Trafford, both of whom were opera singers. He was first educated in Zug, Switzerland, and then in Portugal, but finally settled in England where he married Ruth Dixon (from whom he was divorced in 1932) and became a British citizen in 1918, having worked in War Office intelligence during the First World War.His first novel, The Tavern Knight, was published in 1904, and more novels followed before his first major success The Sea Hawk which was published just after the start of the war. This then led to renewed interest in his earlier novels and assured Sabatini an ardent and loyal following.The majority of his novels are based upon events in European history, and many started out as short stories first published in popular magazines before expansion into full length works. Sabatini also produced two notable historic works, The Life of Cesare Borgia (1912), and Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition (1913), which have been justly praised for being both comprehensive and definitive.He touched on biography further in Heroic Lives (1934) in which he drew away from full life stories so as to concentrate on the circumstances and mind sets of the individuals studied in a determination of what made them into heroes touching the lives of others as they did. In The Historical Nights' Entertainments (1918, 1919, and 1938), which is now combined into a single volume, he investigated numerous historical controversies and further delved into the personalities of selected historical figures.It is Sabatini's deep knowledge of history and his determination to ensure accuracy where facts were stated even within his fictional works, as to customs, politics, religion, together with ordinary everyday human behaviour in context that ensures his books maintain enduring popularity. He covered many periods, but revolutionary France and Renaissance Italy appear most often, with Cesare Borgia making more than one appearance.Many of Sabatini's works were turned into films, notably Captain Blood, Scaramouche, and The Black Swan, and this ensured immense popular success. It was, however, sometimes at the expense of the opinions of some critics who regarded his genre, fundamentally historic and romantic fiction, as a little outside of that ought to be of merit. Many fellow authors admired the manner in which he constructed his plots and his narrative. In particular, they and his army of readers fully appreciated the way his characters were life-like and convincing, and true to historical form.In 1935 Sabatini married again, and he and his new wife, Christine, moved to Herefordshire. Fishing the local River Wye was one of his hobbies, but far from 'retiring' to the country he maintained all of his links with the publishing world in London.Raphael Sabatini died in 1950 following a skiing accident in Switzerland.

Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Scaramouche starts off when Andre-Louis Moreau vows revenge after his best friend was killed in a mockery of a duel by an arrogant nobleman, Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr. With his courage, intelligence and quick wit, Moreau excels as a skilled dramatic actor, a scenario writer, a fencing master, a lawyer, a passionate orator and eventually as a politician, and throughout this he keeps on upsetting the aristocratic Marquis de la Tour d'Azyr in his pursuits. During all this time, the expectation towards the final confrontation between these two men builds up until it is finally settled in an unexpected way. However, being a man who can fight equally well with his sword, his mind, his pen, as well as his mouth, Moreau stays true to his morality and does not allow his quest to destroy the nobleman cloud his judgement as the world around him spirals into total chaos, testing his human character and spirit to the utmost. Filled with exciting swashbuckling action and adventure, duels, romance, intrigue and politics, Scaramouche remains one of the most stimulating and engaging historical action-adventure novels ever written.