Model For Literature
It is widely believed that Herbert is the inspiration for the character Sandy Arbuthnot, a hero in several John Buchan novels. The series starts with The Thirty-Nine Steps, but Arbuthnot's first appearance is in Greenmantle, hence the title of his granddaughter's biography of him, The Man Who Was Greenmantle. Herbert's Italian family villa is the model for that in the Sword of Honour trilogy by his son-in-law Evelyn Waugh.
The cameo character of the 'Honourable Herbert' in Louis de Bernières's novel Birds Without Wings is clearly based on Herbert. He appears as a British liaison officer with the ANZAC troops serving in the Gallipoli campaign. A polyglot officer able to communicate with both sides, he arranges the burial of the dead of both sides, achieving great popularity with both sides - a description that mirrors his role in the 1915 truce.
Read more about this topic: Aubrey Herbert
Famous quotes containing the words model and/or literature:
“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery....Child’s play is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experience by creating model situations and to master reality by experiment and planning.”
—Erik H. Erikson (20th century)
“The newspapers, I perceive, devote some of their columns specially to politics or government without charge; and this, one would say, is all that saves it; but as I love literature and to some extent the truth also, I never read those columns at any rate. I do not wish to blunt my sense of right so much.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)