ROBIN CHAPMAN began his career as an actor at Cambridge (he played Hamlet in the ADC’s centenary production and was president of the Marlowe Society) before holding a spear at Stratford-Upon-Avon, working in repertory and then joining Joan Littlewood’s revolutionary Theatre Workshop where he turned to writing. Among his stage plays are High Street China, Guests and One of Us. His television plays have won awards from the Mystery Writers of America and the Writers Guild as well as a Bafta nomination. Three of his ten novels to date form a trilogy extending the lives and experiences of characters found in Don Quixote. They are available from Oxbow Books at Oxford. Reviewing the first book of the trilogy The Duchess’s Diary in the Times Literary Supplement E.C. Riley said that it “shows a truer understanding of Cervantes than twenty books of criticism” while Karl Miller in the London Review of Books acclaimed Chapman’s “learned and yet fully animate invention”.