A. D. Harvey

Arnold D. Harvey (born 1947) is an English historian and novelist.

Early life and education

Born in and brought up in Colchester, A.D.Harvey read Modern History under Keith Thomas at St John's College, Oxford and obtained his Ph.D. in History at Cambridge only six years after sitting his G.C.E. A-levels, being a member of University College, now Wolfson College, Cambridge.

In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement, he stated that "practically everyone [he] met while an undergraduate 1966-69" was "bored, frustrated and above all disillusioned by an Oxford that was so much more mundane than their school daydreams". His first novel, Oxford: The Novel, fictionalises his time as an undergraduate. It is peppered with erotically charged scenes and attacks on the Oxford student left.^[1]

Academic career

Harvey has taught at the universities of Cambridge, Salerno, La Réunion and Leipzig. He has written several academic monographs dealing with aspects of English cultural, social and military history. These have generally been well received. Kathryn Hughes called him "a master of the concrete, the adroit displayer of the precious scrap of hard fact".^[2] At times his works have been described by reviews as somewhat encyclopaedic and lacking in analysis,^[3] though Andrew Roberts in The Times wrote of his "academically immaculate analyses" and most critics acknowledge the originality of his theoretical ideas. He was briefly editor of the journal Salisbury Review.^[3] He has also contributed widely to History Today magazine and to BBC History Magazine on subjects as diverse as Napoleon, the boroughs of London, Gustav III of Sweden Engelbert Dollfuss.^[4] Churchill on Rollerskates and the Stuka dive-bomber. He has made numerous contributions to specialist journals on different aspects of air warfare and is also known for his pioneering work in The National Archives at Kew on material by or about well-known writers: he has found and published hitherto unknown texts by, amongst others,Lord Byron, Richard Burton, Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster and Ezra Pound.

Harvey has published under many pseudonyms and in 2013 was identified as the author of a 2002 article (attributed to a "Stephanie Harvey") that discussed a previously unknown meeting between Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1862. The account of this meeting and the supposed insight into Dickens' character and literary motivations revealed in a - wholly fictitious - letter by Dostoevsky was subsequently picked up and quoted in a number of scholarly articles and books, including a major biography of Dickens. The hoax, and Harvey's multiple pseudonyms, was finally exposed in an April 2013 article in the Times Literary Supplement by Eric Naiman, Professor of Comparative Literature & Department Chair of Slavic Languages and Literatures at University of California, Berkeley.^[5]

Literary career

Besides Oxford: the Novel, he has also published another novel called Warriors of the Rainbow, described by The Guardian as "weirdly compelling" and by The Independent as"free flowing and poetic".. This is a work of science-fiction about a reanimated woman and her lover in a world controlled by a shadowy cadre of whales.^[6] He is also a published poet( Sonnets 2006) and frequent letter writer to the literary journals of the United Kingdom.^[7]

Select bibliography

• {Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century (1978)
• English Poetry in a Changing Society, 1780–1825 (1980)
• Literature into History (1988)
• Collision of Empires : Britain in Three World Wars, 1793–1945 (1992, revised edition 1994)
• Sex in Georgian England : Attitudes and Prejudices from the 1720s to the 1820s (1994. revised edition 2001)
• A Muse of Fire : Literature, Art and War (1998)
• Arnhem (2001)
• Body Politic: Political Metaphor and Political Violence (2007)

References