Ransome was born in Leeds; the house at 6 Ash Grove, in the Hyde Park area, has a blue plaque beside the door commemorating his birthplace.

Ransome was educated first in Windermere and then at Rugby School (where he lived in the same study room that had been used by Lewis Carroll) but did not entirely enjoy the experience, because of his poor eyesight, lack of athletic skill, and limited academic achievement.

[5] In his first important book, Bohemia in London (1907), Ransome introduced the history of the city's Bohemian literary and artistic communities and some of its current representatives.

[6] Ransome began writing books of biography and literary criticism on various authors; one on Edgar Allan Poe was published in 1910 and another on Oscar Wilde in 1912.

Oscar Wilde, a critical study had been prepared under the guidance of publisher Martin Secker, but Granville had promised better returns and a guaranteed and steady income.

[11] Ransome had also been working on a similar literary biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, but that was abandoned with the manuscript in the first draft and not rediscovered until 1999.

It was subsequently edited and finally published almost a century later in 2011 as Arthur Ransome's Long-lost Study of Robert Louis Stevenson.

It is a gothic romance concerning a youth who chances upon an alchemist who has discovered the titular elixir of life, whose powers must be renewed by the spilling of human blood.

He also covered the Russian Revolutions of 1917 and came to sympathise with the Bolshevik cause, becoming personally close to a number of its leaders, including Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek.

[14] Bruce Lockhart said in his memoirs: "Ransome was a Don Quixote with a walrus moustache, a sentimentalist who could always be relied upon to champion the underdog, and a visionary whose imagination had been fired by the revolution.

Unbeknown to Leeper, Ransome's "near treason[ous]" articles were written to buttress his exceptional access to the Bolshevik leadership.

[14][17] MI5, the British Security Service, was suspicious that Ransome and his fellow journalist, M. Philips Price, were a threat because of their opposition to the Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War.

[15] In October 1919, as Ransome was returning to Moscow on behalf of The Manchester Guardian, the Estonian foreign minister Ants Piip entrusted him to deliver a secret armistice proposal to the Bolsheviks.

After crossing the battle lines on foot, Ransome passed the message, which, to preserve secrecy, had not been written down and depended for its authority only on the high personal regard in which he was held in both countries, to diplomat Maxim Litvinov in Moscow.

By the late 1920s, Ransome had settled in the Lake District because he had decided not to accept a position as a full-time foreign correspondent with The Guardian newspaper.

His move to near Pin Mill in East Anglia enabled him to enjoy sailing on the sea and brought a change of location for four of the books.

Ransome's own interest in sailing and his need to provide an accurate description caused him to undertake a voyage across the North Sea to Flushing in the Netherlands.

His book We Didn't Mean To Go To Sea reflects that, and he based the fictional Goblin on his own boat Nancy Blackett (which in turn took its name from a character in the series).

A trip to China as a foreign correspondent provided Ransome with the imaginative springboard for Missee Lee, in which readers find the Swallows and the Amazons sailing around the world in the schooner Wild Cat from Peter Duck.

(1947) was set in Scotland, and while the plot and action appear realistic, the internal chronology does not fit the usual run of school holiday adventures.

Most notably, two schoolchildren, Pamela Whitlock and Katharine Hull, wrote The Far-Distant Oxus, an adventure story set on Exmoor.

Whitlock sent the manuscript to Ransome in March 1937, and he persuaded his publisher, Jonathan Cape, to produce it, characterising it as "the best children's book of 1937".

[24] After the sale of Racundra in 1925 (in Coles' ownership she became Annette II), Ransome went on (in addition to the occasional charter, loan or trial sail) to own five further cruising yachts.

[25][28] In December 1952, he sold Lottie Blossom to Sir William Paul Mallinson on condition that he (Ransome) retained the name.

Ransome won the inaugural Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising Pigeon Post in the Swallows and Amazons series as the year's best children's book by a British subject.