Breathless Diversions

By Anthony Delano

This hilariously entertaining, deliciously sexy novel of British seapower at the turn of the 19th century is Horatio Hornblower handled with outrageous camp and terrific pace and drive. The naval scenes are superb and Anatolia is a matchless heroine.’

Few sons are blessed with a mother like Anatolia. Freed in girlhood from the sexual and political strictures of the Victorian Age, she makes it her mission to spread liberation among the haughty and powerful captains of the Queen’s Navy. What Anatolia of the mysterious past wants most is a suitable father (or fathers!) for her son and enough patronage to make him, in time, a British admiral. But Midshipman Algernon Block showed no inclination to fulfil his mother’s ambition.

With his fiddle in one hand and the other toying with his trouser-flap, he was undistracted by the new politics of revolution or the frenzied development of great steel fleets by countries heading towards war. Not until the Boxer Rebellion takes him to Peking, and the fabulous erotic treasures of the Breathless Diversions, is Algernon galvanised into a worthy—and prosperous—son.
How Algernon and Anatolia rearrange history is the theme of this highly irreverent and entertaining tale set in the heyday of swashbuckling Imperialism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Delano
• Release date: Jan 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370679836

Anthony Delano

Anthony Delano went to London from Australia after an early newspaper career there and was soon a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mirror, which at that time sold nearly five million copies daily. He was stationed in Rome during the Dolce Vita days, in Paris when General De Gaulle was dismantling the French empire, then the United States where he covered, among many other dramas, the civil rights campaign and the assassination of President John Kennedy. Additional assignments took him all over the globe: wars in Africa and the Middle East, tours with the Queen and other members of the Royal Family; most hazardous of all, perhaps, the historic Beatles tour of America. In between there were executive stints in London. He was managing editor of the Mirror when the monstrous tycoon Robert Maxwell took it over. Clearly time to go. He began to teach journalism and research it academically, gaining first a Master’s degree at Queensland University of Technology then a PhD from the University of Westminster (his 2001 doctoral thesis, The Formation of the British Journalist 1900-2000, is widely cited). He became a senior lecturer, senior research fellow and finally visiting professor at the London College of Communication. He lives in the South of France, married to Patricia, a literary scholar.

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