Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > O'Brian, Patrick - Books Magazine (review date October 1997)

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Books Magazine (review date October 1997)

SOURCE: “In Full Sail,” in Books Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 4, October, 1997, p. 5.

[In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of The Yellow Admiral and notes that he believes O'Brian's work is finally getting the recognition it deserves.]

Tom Stoppard, Mark Knopfler, Professor John Bayley, Nicholas Soames, William Waldegrave, Charlton Heston, Michael Grade, Warren Christopher … What could possibly link such an eclectic group of people? The answer is not what but who—Patrick O'Brian, a reclusive octogenarian who has been described as “the finest novelist now writing in the English language.”

For close on thirty years, O'Brian has been quietly working away on a series of novels set in the Napoleonic wars and featuring Captain ‘Lucky Jack’ Aubrey and his friend and shipmate Stephen Maturin. The sequence opened with Master and...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. John Bayley (essay date 7 November 1991)
   2. Frank Stewart (review date 4 April 1993)
   3. Byron Rogers (review date 10 July 1993)
   4. Michael Dirda (review date August 1993)
   5. Patrick T. Reardon (review date 19 December 1993)
   6. Frederick Pratter (review date 31 December 1993)
   7. John Balzar (review date 2 January 1994)
   8. Thomas McGonigle (review date 2 January 1994)
   9. Elliott Abrams (review date 24 January 1994)
   10. James Hamilton-Paterson (review date 26 December 1994)
   11. Frederick Pratter (review date 2 May 1995)
   12. Katherine A. Powers (review date July 1995)
   13. Sam Pickering (review date Spring 1996)
   14. Thomas R. Edwards (essay date Summer 1996)
   15. John Balzar (review date 20 October 1996)
   16. Edward T. Wheeler (review date 8 November 1996)
   17. Christopher Clausen (review date 16 December 1996)
   18. James Teacher (review date 4 January 1997)
   19. John Mullan (review date 10 January 1997)
   20. Books Magazine (review date October 1997)
   21. Molly Finn (essay date 19 June 1998)
   22. Alan Judd (review date 22 August 1998)
   23. Barbara Everett (review date 4 September 1998)
   24. Martin Jacques (review date 6 September 1998)
   25. Christopher Hitchens (essay date 9 March 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright