I can’t ignore the book that has had such an important influence on my recent life. It’s another biography, sorry about that. Sir Francis Drake by George Malcolm Thomson. It’s certainly a fast paced, fact packed book. It was this passage that changed my life. “The time had come when Wlsingham was no longer satisfied with news that came to him at second-hand, whether from Santa Cruz’s kitchen or from the Governor of Guernsey’s reports of the gossip on Breton ships or in Rouen taverns. He needed an accurate and detailed stream of information about the number of Philip’s ships, their tonnage, the sailors who would man them and the soldiers they would carry. Thanks above all to Standen, he got what he wanted,”. Standen was my mother’s maiden name. After much research I discovered that Sir Anthony Standen was my 10th great-granduncle. I read everything I could find about him. I visited the British Library to read accounts by Venetian diplomats about him. I read letters in the archive of the Duke of Tuscany on JSTOR, but I kept asking myself, why did he do that? And how did he do that? And that, dear reader, was how The Sir Anthony Standen Adventures came about. Why not tell us about a book that has changed your life?