The English Knight

The launch of the booklet The English Knight – short stories by Christopher Long, illustrated by Timur D'Vatz – takes place at The Cadogan Contemporary Gallery, London, on 9 December 2014.

This cover design for The English Knight — short stories by Christopher Long — incorporates detail from Timur D'Vatz's illustration of The English Knight, one of a set of ten canvasses first exhibited at the Galerie de Buci, Paris, in October 2014 and later shown at The Cadogan Contemporary Gallery, London, in December 2014.

The English Knight English version

The English Knight French version

Delia Cardnell's original English Knight illustrations

Christopher Long was born and educated in England and was originally destined for a career at the English bar. However he abandoned the Inner Temple for nearby Fleet Street, becoming a reporter and columnist for the London Newspaper Group, The Evening Standard and London Portrait Magazine. As a specialist in Central London affairs he also contributed to radio and a variety of magazines. In 1987 he became the founding editor of World Magazine and in 1990 of The Music Magazine, both subsequently acquired by the BBC.

Above: A United Nations press card, issued during the darkest days of the Sarajevo siege in the summer of 1992.

He might easily have remained a familiar figure at the heart of London life but for a chance trip to Macedonia in April 1989. There he found he was the sole foreign correspondent in a position to report brutal repression in Pristina, the capital of neighbouring Kosovo.

Convinced that widespread war in Yugoslavia was inevitable, he made a speciality of Balkan affairs and covered the conflicts (1991-99) which consumed Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and finally Kosovo again. These barbaric wars killed 140,000 men, women and children, producing four million refugees.

As a correspondent for The Evening Standard, BBC Radio News, BBC World Service, Sky TV, SABC, ITN, Channel 4, Globus, LBC, Radio Croatia, Reuters Radio News and The Observer among others, he witnessed the sieges of Dubrovnik and Sarajevo, the dismemberment of Mostar and genocide throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina. The cruelty in Mostar made a great impression on him and there he was a producer of a TV documentary for NHK Japan.

Left: Christopher on a mined road near Sibernik in 1991.

He paid a high personal price for his eleven tours in the Balkans but one happy consequence was that these experiences provoked him to introduce us to The English Knight.

“I had spent my professional life reporting current events as dispassionately as possible and recording the lives and achievements of others. But in the Balkans, when I thought I might not survive the war I was reporting, I must have had an overwhelming need to review my own life and to leave some written trace of myself. Fortunately a knight came to my rescue.

“At the time I thought I was experimenting in writing fables with a child-like simplicity of form. I certainly never intended them to be autobiographical. Now, of course, I can see them for what they are and that they were destined for adults – for people who know that little in life is simple. The stories describe defining moments we each experience in our own way — times when we are most alone.

“Reading them today, I’m as surprised as anyone to see myself learning to deal with love and betrayal, with kindness and cruelty, discovering fundamental truths in my chosen profession and accepting that one has little strength until one acknowledges one’s weakness. And finally I see myself preparing for old age and death. There’s a happy ending however because in this book I am even younger in the last story than I was in the first.”

Above: Today, Christopher Long lives with his wife Sarah on a small farm in the heart of rural Normandy.

The English Knight English version

The English Knight French version

Delia Cardnell's original English Knight illustrations

© (2014) Christopher A. Long. Copyright, Syndication & All Rights Reserved Worldwide.
The text and graphical content of this and linked documents are the copyright of their author and or creator and site designer, Christopher Long, unless otherwise stated. No publication, reproduction or exploitation of this material may be made in any form prior to clear written agreement of terms with the author or his agents.

A potential front cover design (at the top of this page, designed by Christopher Long © 2014) was offered to a French publisher who at one stage planned to publish the The English Knight stories under the title of The English Knight & Le chevalier français. The design incorporates detail from the painting The English Knight by Timur D'Vatz [© 2014], 80 x 80 cm, oil on canvas, first exhibited at the Galerie de Buci, Paris, in October 2014.

Christopher Long