Dear Mr. Cornwell. It has been some time, and that time has been spent revisiting London. I saw for the first time Aspley House, Wellingtons official residence, and was severely shocked by the sheer lack of taste and style. A street vendor in Mombassa would have been shocked by the sheer lack of taste and style. This was so far away from my picture of the duke as a modest man with no taste for plush luxury, that I could hardly believe it. On the other hand, what a treat it was to dash into the nearest Waterstone and discover your Starbuck Chronicles for the first time. They are brilliant, and very different from most of your work, the themes being to grow up and emancipate from ones parents, what moral really is, how to reconsider Christianity in a modern and humane context, how poverty can almost be a disease etc. This little historian from Denmark was awed over the rich material you have mustered, how you master the mentality of the time etc. Well done, very well done indeed. Preben Christensen Kalundborg