Watch this Space

6/8/15. I was flabbergasted last week when the TLS featured ‘Calderonia’ a second time on its very popular blog, this time to mark our closing (see link on right under ‘Related’ to ‘Second TLS blog post’). I cannot thank Michael Caines enough for his attention and his superb summation plus discussion of themes touched on over the past year, many of which he has linked in his text back to where they feature in ‘Calderonia’.

Long-term followers will be interested to hear that we have identified ‘Peel’ in my blogs about ‘appling’ (22 January, 19 March, 15 May, 19 July 2015) as Lieutenant Robert Peel of the 9th Ox and Bucks, who in May 1915 was aged thirty, married, with a son aged three. His wife was Helen Beatrice Mansell Peel, née Merry, aged twenty-four. This must mean I was right in reading her name under Kittie’s ‘appling’ as [Helen?], when the graphologist had failed! But we still don’t know who ‘[Emma?], poor girl’ was. Further, when I looked at a screen image of the inquiry form about George sent by the War Office to the U.S. Embassy in Constantinople (see my post of 29 July) I discerned it was headed in pale blue ink ‘Commented’ — and the comment was the word ‘Ottoman?’ written over ‘British Foreign Office’. So someone in the War Office wondered whether Hoffman Philip
had got it wrong, too. The new facts in the present paragraph will be incorporated in the appropriate blog posts. I have already rewritten my post for 4 June 1915.

The search for the best publisher carries on. I have approached twenty, haven’t yet heard from them all, and have another twenty-seven possibles at the time of writing. The market, as I’ve always known, is tough for biographies of dead, ‘unknown’ people, however flamboyant and original. Usually the ‘rejections’ are affable and apologetic enough. I have also approached an agent. If you have any ideas, please email them me through my website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

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