His range included disturbing studies of the macabre, children's stories and historical fiction, most notably his Herries Chronicle series, set in the Lake District. Maugham assured Walpole that he was not the model for Alroy Kear, who, Maugham averred, was chiefly based on himself. The father is a strange and fearsome man that uproots his family to the bleak landscape of his childhood. The Tate benefitted greatly from his collection – he left it his Cézanne watercolour of the Mont St Victoire, an Augustus John sketch of WB Yeats and Renoir's charming Head of a Girl as well as works by Manet, Forain, Sickert, Blake and Tissot.

High Walpole was a popular and prolific author in his day, and he was one of those very traditional story tellers who fell out of fashion when modernism came to the fore.He found that day boys were looked down on by boarders, and that Bede College was the subject of snobbery within the university.

that Hugh Walpole began with Rogue Herries (1930) was the result of his desire to do homage to the part of Cumberland, in England, where he had elected to live. The terraced garden in front of the house was designed by Walpole, who channelled a small beck to feed fountains and a pond. The novel is set in the early to mid eighteenth century and Walpole captures the mood of change very well. In the summer of 1915 he worked on the Austrian-Russian front, assisting at operations in field hospitals and retrieving the dead and wounded from the battlefield. We build and maintain all our own systems, but we don’t charge for access, sell user information, or run ads.

The Guardian reviewer observed that the setting of Mr Perrin and Mr Traill – a second-rate public school – was clearly drawn from life, as indeed it was. He was a patron of the visual arts and bequeathed a substantial legacy of paintings to the Tate Gallery and other British institutions. Walpole described the novel as "a fine, queer book in the big manner", and though it's an unwieldy work to condense for the stage, Louise Page's adaptation seems quite at home amid the lakes and fells that inspired it. I know it is rainier then, but we don’t mind hiking in drizzle, as long as we can (hopefully 🙂) avoid a downpour. So I unpacked a box of books after moving, found it and decided to read it again, nearly 50 years later.

Details of each book as follows - Book One - Rogue Herries ( 0330025570 ),1972,445pp,Used,reading wear,spine creased ,page edges tanned,sellotape marks inside front cover,contents clean; Book Two - Judith Paris ( 0330025856),1972,463pp, as above except fold-out Family Tree of Herries Family stuck to inside of back cover; Volume Three - The Fortress (0330026429),1972,496pp,as Volume Two; Volume Four - Vanessa ( 0330026437),1972,528pp, as Volume Two. His range included disturbing studies of the macabre, children's stories and historical fiction, most notably his "Herries" series, set in the Lake District. The valley then opens out around Grange before the river empties into Derwentwater, overlooked by Catbells, Skiddaw and Walla Crag. And during a gathering of authors at his house in London, he founded The Book Society to promote "the advancement of literature" - the forerunner of what is now the Booktrust charity.The reviewer Ivor Brown commented that Walpole had earlier charmed many with his cheerful tales of Mayfair, but that in this novel he showed a greater side to his art: "This is a book with little happiness about it, but its stark strength is undeniable. It is the first of four chronicles of the Herries family, stretching over seven generations from early Georgian times until the First World War. There was a brief mention of a boat launch in the RS video on the Lake District and it looked intriguing, but I had not looked into further as of yet.

He left readers to read between the lines if they wished, in, for example, references to Turkish baths "providing informal opportunities of meeting interesting strangers".

The belittling tone of the obituary brought forth strong rebuttals from T S Eliot, Kenneth Clark and Priestley, among others. I’m pretty sure my mother’s book must have been an abridged version of all four novels although I remember at the time I’d been proud and surprised I’d read such a big book.