Raleigh Trevelyan Biography

British author, born in Port Blair in the Andaman Islands; he spent his early years in India and Kashmir and was educated at Winchester College. From 1942 to 1946 he was on active service and drew on his experiences of combat in Italy for The Fortress: Anzio and After (1956) and Rome '44: The Battle for the Eternal City (1981); both were widely acclaimed for combining authoritative military history with vivid and emotionally compelling personal recollection. In 1948 he took up the first of his many senior positions in publishing. His extensive familiarity with Italy is reflected in Princes under the Volcano (1972), an account of Sicily, and the treatment of the destruction of Pompeii in The Shadow of Vesuvius (1976). The informatively accessible study of the artistic movement in A Pre-Raphaelite Circle (1978) draws on records of his family, as does The Golden Oriole (1987), a wide-ranging treatment of the British in India based on five journeys to places he knew in childhood. His other publications include A Hermit Disclosed (1960), a sympathetic portrait of an Essex recluse, and Grand Dukes and Diamonds (1991), about the mining magnate Sir Julius Wernher and his descendants.