The Floating Admiral

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was an English priest, theologian and writer, including crime novels and regular broadcasts for BBC Radio. Knox had attended Eton College, and he won several scholarships at Balliol College, Oxford. Knox was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1912 and was appointed chaplain... of Trinity College, Oxford, but he left in 1917 to convert to Catholicism. In 1918 he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. Ronald Knox wrote many books of essays and novels. Directed by the Catholic clergy, he re-translated the Latin Vulgate Bible into English, using Hebrew and Greek sources, beginning in 1936. Ronald Knox was born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, England into an Anglican family. His father was Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, who became the Bishop of Manchester. The young Knox was educated at Eton College, where he took the first scholarship in 1900 and Balliol College, Oxford, where again he won the first classics scholarship in 1905.
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Dorothy Leigh Sayers was a renowned English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator and Christian humanist. She was also a student of classical and modern languages. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories set between World War I and World War II that... feature English aristocrat and amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. However, Sayers herself considered her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy to be her best work. She is also known for her plays and essays. Sayers, an only child, was born on 13 June 1893 at the Head Master's House, Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, where her father, the Rev. Henry Sayers, M.A., was chaplain of Christ Church and headmaster of the Choir School. She grew up in the tiny village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdonshire, after her father was given the living there as rector.
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton, KC*SG was an English writer. He published works on philosophy, ontology, poetry, plays, journalism, public lectures and debates, literary and art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics, and fiction, including fantasy and detective fiction. Chesterton has been called... the "prince of paradox". Time magazine, in a review of a biography of Chesterton, observed of his writing style: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out." For example, Chesterton wrote "Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it." Chesterton is well known for his reasoned apologetics and even some of those who disagree with him have recognized the universal appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton, as a political thinker, cast aspersions on both progressivism and conservatism, saying, "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes.
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and more than 15 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.... According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her novels have sold roughly four billion copies, and her estate claims that her works rank third, after those of William Shakespeare and the Bible, as the most widely published books. According to Index Translationum, Christie is the most translated individual author, with only the collective corporate works of Walt Disney Productions surpassing her. Her books have been translated into at least 103 languages. Agatha Christie published two autobiographies: a posthumous one covering childhood to old age; and another chronicling several seasons of archaeological excavation in Syria and Iraq with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan.
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Freeman Wills Crofts was an Irish mystery author, one of the 'Big Four' of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Crofts was born at 26 Waterloo Road, Dublin, Ireland. His father had the same name as he, Freeman Wills Crofts, and was a surgeon-lieutenant in the Army Medical Service, but he died of... fever in Honduras before the young Freeman Wills Crofts was born. His mother, née Celia Frances Wise, re-married the Venerable Jonathan Harding, Vicar of Gilford, County Down, and Archdeacon of Dromore, and Crofts was brought up in the Gilford vicarage. He attended Methodist College and Campbell College in Belfast. In 1912 he married Mary Bellas Canning, daughter of the manager of a local bank in Coleraine. In 1896, at the age of seventeen, Crofts was apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Berkeley Deane Wise, who was chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. In 1899 Crofts was appointed Junior Assistant on the construction of the Londonderry and Strabane Extension of the Donegal Railway. In 1900 he became District Engineer at Coleraine for the L.M.S.
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