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395. PAYNE, Robert. THE GRANITE ISLAND. 1945. Cape. £6.00

Robert Payne (December 4, 1911 – March 3, 1983), born Pierre Stephen Robert Payne, became an armament officer and chief camouflage officer for British Army Intelligence at Singapore in 1941.

"Born in Cornwall, the son of an English naval architect, and with a French mother. He worked as a shipbuilder and then for a time with the Inland Revenue. In 1941 he became an armament officer and chief camouflage officer for British Army Intelligence at Singapore.

In the summer of 1946, Payne traveled to China and visited with and interviewed Mao Zedong in Yenan. During the interview Mao correctly predicted that it would only take the Communist forces a year and a half to conquer China once the armistice with the Chiang Kai-shek and his followers was broken[1].

Payne had more than 110 books published, novels, histories and biographies. He was best known for the biographies, which included studies of Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Dostoyevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Sun Yat-sen, André Malraux, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, The White Rajahs of Sarawak and George C. Marshall.

As a novelist, Payne used the pseudonyms Richard Cargoe, John Anthony Devon, Howard Horne, Valentin Tikhonov, and Robert Young. In his biographies, he appears as Robert Payne rather than Pierre Stephen Robert Payne."
--Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Stephen_Robert_Payne

395. PAYNE, Robert. THE GRANITE ISLAND. 1945. Cape. £6.00