Bernard Cornwell
speaker
244 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Bernard Cornwell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
And, of course, it didn't exist.
And, I mean, literally for years I would go into bookshops and look and see if someone had started to write this, and they hadn't.
And then eventually a little light went off in my head and said, well, you always wanted to write a book, write that one.
And then when circumstances dictated that I write a book, I knew what I wanted to write.
I always thought it's not difficult to write.
We can all write.
It's very difficult to write well, and it's almost impossible to know what to write about.
And I did know what I wanted to write about.
So he's Hornblower on land, but he's not such a nice man as Hornblower.
I'll grant that.
Yeah, I mean, the only things I'd worked out about Sharp before I even began to write him was that, one, he had to have come up from the ranks, because that makes him different to all the other officers around him.
Something I discovered quite early on with the books was that his enemies really couldn't be the French because he doesn't spend all his life with the French.
His enemies have to be on his own side.
And making him up from the ranks creates lots and lots of those enemies.
And the other thing I knew about him was that he had to be a rifleman because the rifles were different to every other soldier in the army.
So he is an outsider.
And those early decisions taken before I even tried to write him have proved very useful to me.
I don't see Sean, I hear Sean.
I mean, I guess in the very first book, Sharp's Eagle, I give a physical description of Sharp and he's definitely black haired.
And I still get letters to this day from people saying, how could you like Sean?
Showing 81–100 of 244 · page 5 of 13
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