Patrick O'Brian
Master and Commander is the first novel of the Aubrey-Maturin series, a sequence of twenty novels written in the genre of historical prose literature that stands as Patrick O'Brian's notable work.
Patrick O'Brian was born Richard Patrick Russ on December 12, 1914, in Chalfont St Peter, and held citizenship of the United Kingdom. He later adopted the name under which he pursued his career as a novelist, working across the related fields of writing, translation, and linguistics, with English as his primary literary language. The Aubrey-Maturin series occupied a central place in that career, extending across twenty novels and representing the work for which he became known as a writer of historical prose literature.
The series was not fully completed at the time of O'Brian's death. A partially finished twenty-first novel existed in manuscript and was published posthumously, carrying the Aubrey-Maturin sequence beyond the twenty novels O'Brian had seen through to publication. During his lifetime he received the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in recognition of his work as a writer.
O'Brian died on January 2, 2000, in Dublin. The posthumous publication of the unfinished twenty-first installment of the Aubrey-Maturin series provided a concrete final point to a sequence that had run to twenty novels across his career, ensuring that his last, incomplete work reached readers after his death.
Quotes by Patrick O'Brian
Of course I do know it is the French who are so wicked; but there are all these people who keep coming and going – the Austrians, the Spaniards, the Russians. Pray, are the Russians good now? It would be very shocking – treason no doubt – to put the wrong people in my prayers.
I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium... – but man as part of a movement or a crowd is... inhuman... the only feelings I have are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone... Patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.
One of the miseries of medical life is that on the one hand you know what shocking things can happen to the human body and on the other you know how very little we can really do about most of them.
He cannot hold his wine; he has no head for it. Why, on no more than three glasses, for I absolutely poured him out no more, he was on the point of singing Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle, in a King’s ship, upon my sacred honour!
All your sea-omens are of disaster; and of course, with man in his present unhappy state, huddled together in numbers far too great and spending all his surplus time and treasure beating out his brother’s brains, any gloomy foreboding is likely to be fulfilled; but your corpse, your parson, your St Elmo’s fire is not the cause of the tragedy.
It is a great while since I felt the grind of bone under my saw,′ he added, smiling with anticipation.
Few had much room to cast stones, but hypocrisy has never failed the English middle class in any latitude, and they flung them in plenty with delighted, shocked abandon – rocks, boulders, limited in size only by fear for their husband’s advancement. Conciliating discretion had never been among Mrs Villiers’s qualities, and if subjects for malignant gossip had been wanting she would have provided them by the elephant-load.
Yet whether wisdom can be any more profitably pursued than happiness is a question.
Still, the farther hills remained as untouched as the sea; high, remote, arid, dark and sterile, poisoned with the sun.