You can guess where this article is going. It will start as an honest attempt to explain why so many newly published books are being ignored in the UK and quickly become a pathetic plea for someone, anyone, to say they loved my book, and would like to buy a copy.

Well, that is not the intention. My purpose is to try and show how stacked the odds are against a writer of niche non-fiction. I am using my books and my experience as an example but there are thousands of writers out there with the…

Homer, ancient Greece and Tahiti

Tahiti has always had a rather strange relationship with ancient Greece. The paintings and engravings produced after Tahiti was first visited by Europeans in the 1760s were neoclassical in style. So, Polynesians were depicted as if ancient Greeks, wearing togas and carrying palm fronds.

These pictures established Tahiti as an arcadia or Garden of Eden, an image which endured throughout the 19^th century and indirectly led, in the early 1920s, to a Tahi…

When I was young, I didn’t know much about my grandfather. All I knew was that Robert Keable had been a well-known popular novelist in the 1920s, since forgotten, and that he had run away to live in Tahiti after the First World War, and died there. If I ever told anyone the little I knew, they would invariably say something along the lines of: ‘oh, just like Gauguin.’ 

Robert Keable in Tahiti 1927

It all seemed very exotic that my grandfather could be like Gaug…

Guys like Gauguin, my book on British and American ex-pats who moved to Tahiti in the 1920s, published by Troubador is coming out in August 2026.

My interest in 1920s Tahiti arose out of research into the life of my grandfather, Robert Keable. I was particularly intrigued by his book Tahiti, Isle of Dreams. Keable arrived in Tahiti at the end of 1922 with his common-law wife Jolie Buck, having just separated from his newly converted catholic wife Sybil. He spent the first…

Over the last few weeks, I have had some wonderful unsolicited emails from people praising my book so I thought I would gather some of the comments below. (To find out more about where these reviews came from, please scroll down to the bottom of the page.)

Guys like Gauguin – The Artists and Writers Who Followed a Legend to Paradise

Guys like Gauguin… stopped me cold. Not because the subject is obscure. But because (it is) a cultural history so fascinating, so richly detaile…

One of the writers and artists I write about in my new book Guys like Gauguin is Robert lee Eskridge an American artist who found fame in Hawaii. My initial interest in him came through the fact that he stayed with my grandfather for a few weeks in Tahiti, and painted a wonderful portrait of Princess Ina Salmon, then pregnant with my father’s half-brother.

CJ Cook, Robert Lee Eskridge

Earlier this month (August 2026) CJ Cook published a wonderful biography of Eskridge: Robert Lee Es…

You wait 4 years to publish a new book and then two come along in the same month! Well not quite two whole books. There is my non-fiction story of 1920’s writers and artists in Tahiti – Guys like Gauguin - published by Troubador Publishing and then also my contribution to a book on African fiction.

Fiction as Memory: The Great War in Africa

Three years ago, I was asked by Anne Sansom the co-ordinator of the Great War Africa Association (GWAA) if I would be interested in c…

In my new book, Guys like Gauguin, I look at the writers and artists who lived in Tahiti in the 1920s. But I begin the book by considering the writers and artists who helped create the image of Tahiti as an island paradise. And I look at how the timing of the ‘discovery’ of Tahiti by Europeans was so significant occurring during the Age of Enlightenment and when Neoclassicalism art was at its peak.

Neoclassicalism

The four major Western art movements between 1600 and 1850s wer…

My interest in Tahiti comes from the fact that my grandfather Robert Keable, an Englishman, lived there in the 1920s. As I show in my book Guys like Gauguin (coming out in August 2026) there were a number of English and American writers and artists who settled on the island during that decade. Part of the attraction of Tahiti at that time was that it was French. It meant high quality food, cheap wines and spirits and officials who seldom interfered. But why was the island French and not English…

In my book Guys like Gauguin, I look at the lives and work of some of the artists and writers who travelled to live and work in Tahiti in the 1920s.

Paul Engdahl

Engdahl was born in the small historic city of Kristinehamn in Sweden in 1888. As a young man he joined the Rackstad art colony who were at the forefront of a new Swedish art movement, National Romanticism, which focused on nature, Nordic folklore and national identity.

He arrived in Tahiti in the early 1920s and Robert K…

In my book Guys like Gauguin, I look at the lives and work of some of the artists and writers who travelled to live and work in Tahiti in the 1920s.

Adriaan Herman Gouwe

Gouwe born in the Netherlands in 1875 was a Dutch Luminist, painting glorious sunrises and sunsets often with his trademark ox and plough. He was highly rated as a painter, mentioned in the same breath as his Dutch contemporary Piet Mondrian, and yet in 1927 he ran away to Tahiti and lived on the nearby island of Raiatea …

My new book Guys like Gauguin will be published in August 2026. Below is the index of chapters

Part One: The Enduring Image

1. The creation of the image of Tahiti: first visitors

2. Tahiti in the 19^th century

3. Repeating the image: 19^th-century writers and artists

4. Paul Gauguin      

5. Tahiti at the beginning of the 20^th century

Part Two: The 1920s Craze

6. The books that started the craze

7. The South Seas and Tahiti…