Catriona (novel) the 3rd duke of Argyll, Simon Fraser of Lovat, Prophet Peden and Hugh Palliser were real people and the frigate HMS "Seahorse" actually existed. However, the heroine who gives her name to the novel is a fictional character. The real James MacGregor had seven sons and six daughters, none of them named Catriona. The 1971 film "Kidnapped" was based on "Kidnapped" and the first half of "Catriona". Catriona (novel) Catriona (also known as David Balfour) is an 1893 novel written by Robert Louis Stevenson as a sequel to his earlier novel "Kidnapped" (1886). It was first published in the magazine
The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul is a biography of the Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul by Patrick French. It was published in 2008 (by Picador in the UK and Knopf in the USA). The title is a quotation from Naipaul's book "A Bend in the River". "The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it." French deals with Naipaul's family background and his life from his birth in 1932 until his second marriage