SOURCE: “In Full Sail,” in Books Magazine, Vol. 11, No. 4, October, 1997, p. 5.

In the following review, the critic offers a positive assessment of The Yellow Admiral and notes that he believes O'Brian's work is finally getting the recognition it deserves.

Tom Stoppard, Mark Knopfler, Professor John Bayley, Nicholas Soames, William Waldegrave, Charlton Heston, Michael Grade, Warren Christopher … What could possibly link such an eclectic group of people? The answer is not what but who—Patrick O'Brian, a reclusive octogenarian who has been described as “the finest novelist now writing in the English language.”

For close on thirty years, O'Brian has been quietly working away on a series of novels set in the Napoleonic wars and featuring Captain ‘Lucky Jack’ Aubrey and his friend and shipmate Stephen Maturin. The sequence opened with Master and Commander and the latest—his eighteenth—is The Yellow Admiral. Set against the backdrop of the...