William Gerhardie

[2] In 1915, during the First World War he enlisted in the Royal Scots Greys and trained in England while applying for a commission as an officer.

[3] During that period he witnessed the development of the 1917 Revolution which ruined his father who escaped Russia to exile in England having been allowed out through being identified with the (already dead) British socialist Keir Hardie.

Again it deals with Russia (Gerhardie was strongly influenced by the tragi-comic style of Russian writers such as Anton Chekhov, about whom he wrote a study while in college).

In the Second World War, Gerhardie served in the Officers Emergency Reserve and from 1942 to 1945 he worked with the BBC in its European Division, where he was first editor of the "English by Radio" language programme.

[4] After his death, an idiosyncratic study of world history between 1890 and 1940 was discovered among his papers, which was edited by Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky and published as God's Fifth Column.

[4] Asked how to say his name, he told the Literary Digest it was "pronounced jer (as Ger in Gerald) hardy, with the accent on the a: jer-har'dy.

"[5] The contemporary British novelist William Boyd has identified Gerhardie, along with Cyril Connolly, as key inspirations for the central character (the writer Logan Mountstuart) in his 2002 novel Any Human Heart.