it "the jolliest roman-fleuve" – though it is likely that he gained wider public recognition for his TV work, especially the adaptation of The Pallisers (1974) and Edward & Mrs. Simpson (1978). As he grew older his rate of output lessened, and there was deterioration in its quality, but he was still being published in the late 1990s, his last book being Remember Your Grammar and Other Haunted Stories (1997), a collection of ghost and supernatural short stories. Raven's book of anecdotes and reminiscences, Is there anybody there? said the Traveller (Frederick Muller 1990) was withdrawn after a series of libel action threats, including a writ from Anthony Blond. Thereafter he planned, or at least threatened, to write a new work All Safely Dead, in which, safe from the laws of libel, he could "expose" various deceased luminaries from the British social, academic, political and literary scenes, but the book was never written. Later life Throughout his life, Raven pursued a hedonistic lifestyle which included eating, drinking, travel, cricket, gambling and socialising. He spent what he earned, and after 34 years in Kent at Blond's behest he finally moved to London on securing lodgings in the London Charterhouse, the almshouse historically associated with Charterhouse School. Here he led a quieter version of his former life. In 1993, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. A biography of Raven, The Captain, written by Michael Barber, was published in 1996. In 1997, he appeared with Melvyn Bragg in a South Bank Show devoted to his career, in good spirits and without regrets. His health continued to fail, however, and after a series of strokes he died in London on 12 May 2001, aged 73. Legacy Raven's obituary in The Guardian observed that, "he combined elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester", and that he reminded Noel Annan, his Cambridge tutor, of the young Guy Burgess. Among the many things said about him, perhaps the most quoted was that he had "the mind of a cad and the pen of an angel". E. W. Swanton called Raven's cricket memoir Shadows on the Grass "the filthiest cricket book ever written". Typically, Raven's response to this was to ask Swanton's permission to quote this opinion on the book's jacket. He has also been called "cynical" and "cold-blooded", his characters "guaranteed to behave badly under pressure; most of