Treasure Island on BBC4

Part 3 of the BBC 4 Television series Picture Book, shown on 19th November, was very enthusiastic in its praise for the Mervyn Peake illustrations for Treasure Island, describing them as possibly the finest produced for this wonderful classic.

Given the book at a very young age by his own father, my father would read Stevenson's masterpiece under a tree in the courtyard of McKenzie Memorial Hospital, Tientsin, China, where his father was medical director. Memories of the impact the novel had on his own imagination, surely inspired the drawings which later brought to such vivid life, Long John Silver, Ben Gunn, Dr Livesey, Israel Hands, Jim and others.