Rafael Sabatini

Rafael Sabatini (1875–1950) was born in Jesi, Italy, to an Italian father and an English mother, both opera singers, and was educated in Portugal and Switzerland. He settled in England at seventeen and chose to write in English because, he said, all the best stories were written in it. After two decades of modest sales his historical novels Scaramouche (1921) and Captain Blood (1922) made him famous, followed by The Sea Hawk and a series of swashbuckling romances set in Renaissance Italy, revolutionary France and the Caribbean. His epitaph, "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad," is Scaramouche's opening line.