After Dinner Speakers: Frederick Forsyth, Steeleye Span, Paul Merrett

Frederick Forsyth is a best-selling writer. His life is also quite adventurous, for he signed on the RAF and became the youngest pilot in the Air Force. Then he went into journalism, travelling around and doing research work for his articles, and with all this, he began writing novels. He is renowned for all his research in the subjects he is going to write about, and that's the key to his success: his books always seem plausible. When he moved to Paris, he learnt about OAS, which was going to be the basis for The Day of the Jackal (1971), his masterpiece. The Jackal was an anonymous Englishman quite outstanding in his profession: he was the best assassin! And French authorities had to work a lot to get hold of him. The following year he published The Odessa File (1972), about members of SS and a newspaperman called Peter Miller. It was precisely in Berlin where he compiled dossiers about Nazis in order to write a plausible plot. Other major novels of Frederick Forsyth are The Dogs of War (Corgi, Buffalo, New York, 1974), The Sheperd (1975), The Fourth Protocol (1984), The Negotiator (1989) and The Fist of God (1994), set in the Allied-Iraqui Gulf War of 1991.