Hello and welcome to the 10th episode of Chronicles, where as a bit of fun, we thought we'd celebrate by covering Master and Commander,

the first novel in the Aubrey Maturon series by Patrick O'Brien.

And here to help me along and talk all about naval warfare

and the fun of the novel is Admiral Dade himself.

Admiral of the Fleet.

It's a great book, isn't it? It is. It is very good.

Very, very good.

It's been a long time since I'd actually read it, and then I've revisited it in preparation for this.

One thing I will just say, though, off the bat, is I had a look through a lot of online forums

for just people who are fans of the series.

And a lot of them don't even rank this in the top five.

Bear in mind, there's 20 novels.

I was going to say, there's a load of them, aren't there?

Yeah.

So this is not regarded as the strongest start actually in the world.

That's interesting.

It's still him finding his stride with it.

It is an opening of a much, much longer saga, sure.

In my mind, I put hornblower, master and commander and sharp together.

Because of course, they're all sort of 19th century in the polioic era stuff.

And actually, I came to the series late.

I was always a hornblower man myself.

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