In 1974, Jeffrey Archer lost everything.
asserted
Archer → lose → everything
The then MP for Louth in Lincolnshire had taken out a second mortgage on the £100,000 family home in The Boltons, Kensington, and borrowed further cash from a friend to invest £350,000 in a Canadian industrial cleaning company called Aquablast.
asserted
MP → take → company
He had been assured it would make him a millionaire.
asserted
him → assure → ?
By the time the company went into liquidation, Archer was declared bankrupt, and his wife, Mary, was seven months pregnant with their second child.
asserted
wife → go → child
Archer was forced to give up his Parliamentary seat, and it seemed as though all was lost.
asserted
all → force → seat
But Jeffrey Howard Archer was to make a lifelong habit of bouncing back from adversity.
asserted
Archer → make → adversity
Aged 34, penniless and with a growing family, he picked up a pen and set about writing his first novel: ‘Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less.’
asserted
he → age → novel
The book went on to become a best-seller and sparked a 50-year writing career comprising 31 novels, three stage plays and numerous short stories.
asserted
book → go → novels
By the time of his death yesterday at the age of 86, Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare had not only sold more than 320million books across 115 countries, but lived a life more curious, colourful and at times outrageous than any he could have concocted on the page.
uncertain
he → sell → page
Not only a best-selling author, but an outstanding amateur athlete, a prolific art collector, Conservative MP – and later Deputy Party Chairman under Margaret Thatcher – Jeffrey Archer served two years and two days in prison for perjury in 2001, only to get out and return to his seat in the House of Lords and continue his literary career undiminished.
asserted
Archer → sell → career
Indeed, his death came just a day before the publication of his final novel Adam and Eve, out today, Tuesday, October 6.
asserted
death → come → novel
But Archer, born in north London in 1940, did not confine his fiction to the page.
asserted
Archer → bear → page
He was a prodigious fibber who turned the lie into an art form and so skewered the truth that in 2001 the journalist Kevin Maguire claimed even Archer ‘would not have dared to create a character so untruthful as himself'.
asserted
Archer → turn → himself
By the time of his death at 86, Jeffrey Archer had sold more than 320million books.
asserted
Archer → sell → books
The novelist and former MP was pictured on Sunday, the day before he died
Not only a best-selling author, Archer was an outstanding amateur athlete, a prolific art collector, Conservative MP and later Deputy Party Chairman under Margaret Thatcher
His first great untruth was that, having been elected to represent the Lincolnshire constituency of Louth at the tender age of 29 in 1969, he was the youngest ever MP.
asserted
he → picture → 1969
In fact, he wasn’t even the youngest MP elected that year, for in April 1969 Bernadette Devlin won in Mid-Ulster aged just 22.
asserted
Devlin → elect → Ulster
Just five weeks before his own by-election victory, Christopher Ward also joined the House at the age of 25.
asserted
Ward → join → 25
Archer also allegedly inflated his O Levels to get into Oxford, claimed a non-existent year at Sandhurst on his CV and painted his father as a war hero despite him being a bigamist and a fraud who absconded to the US to avoid arrest.
uncertain
who → inflate → arrest
And yet, Jeffrey Archer always seemed to get away with it.
asserted
Archer → seem → it
His errant tongue only served to strengthen his image as an affable rogue of endless ambition and one of the greatest storytellers of his generation.
asserted
tongue → serve → generation
As the blurb reads on the front of his 1996 novel The Fourth Estate: ‘If there were a Nobel Prize for storytelling, Archer would win.’
asserted
Archer → read → storytelling
Prior to publishing his first book, Archer enjoyed a very short stint as an army recruit – one fellow soldier recalled he was ‘hugely insensitive and amazingly pleased with himself’ – and five months with the Metropolitan Police on the beat in Brixton, south London.
asserted
he → publish → Brixton
He also claimed in his early twenties to have 'sailed to California via Scotland and the Panama Canal on a tramp steamer’, raised half a million dollars for a Canadian charity and obtained a degree from Berkeley in California.
asserted
He → claim → California
According to those who knew the young Archer – which included his good friend Princess Diana – recollections may vary.
uncertain
recollections → accord → friend
Regardless, he made his first foray into politics serving as a Tory Councillor for Havering on the Greater London Council where he earned the nickname ‘Mr 10 per cent’ for helping councillors with their expenses in return for a cut of the remuneration.
asserted
he → make → remuneration
He later became an MP in December 1969, winning the Louth by-election.
asserted
He → become → election
After his five years in Parliament were cut short by bankruptcy, the man Margaret Thatcher once described as the ‘extrovert’s extrovert’ finally turned to novel writing.
asserted
Thatcher → cut → writing
It was really his third novel, Kane and Abel, published in 1979, that catapulted Archer to fame and riches and it remains one of the best-selling books of all time, having shifted more than 30 million copies globally – more than The Great Gatsby and Gone With the Wind.
asserted
it → publish → Wind
It was later adapted for television starring Ed Begley Jr and François-Eric Gendron.
asserted
It → adapt → Jr
Despite his prolific output, Archer claimed later in life not to know how to turn on a computer and that he wrote all his novels by hand in felt-tip pen on lined paper.
asserted
he → claim → paper
The riches that inevitably came with his extraordinary literary success – estimated at over £200million by the time of his death – were put to good use, not least with the accumulation of an enviable art collection, something the writer termed his ‘real passion’.
asserted
writer → come → collection
It is something of legend that at his frequent lunch parties and infamous Christmas parties – featuring Krug champagne and shepherd’s pie – Archer would tell guests enquiring after the whereabouts of the loo: ‘turn left at the Picasso and right at the Monet’.
asserted
Archer → feature → Monet
Archer’s collection, about 10 per cent of which he auctioned off for over £5million in 2011 at Christie’s in London, also included pieces by L S Lowry, Andy Warhol and Camille Pissarro.
asserted
he → auction → Lowry
After his five years in Parliament were cut short by bankruptcy, the man Margaret Thatcher once described as the ‘extrovert’s extrovert’ turned to novel writing
Archer met his wife Mary – made a Dame in 2012 for services to the NHS – when she was a 19-year-old chemistry student at Oxford.
asserted
she → cut → Oxford
The pair married in 1966
But there was trouble too.
asserted
pair → marry → 1966
And indeed, one almighty lie that led to Archer’s dramatic fall from grace.
asserted
that → lead → grace
In 1987, Archer successfully sued the Daily Star newspaper after it claimed the writer had paid £2,000 to sleep with prostitute Monica Coghlan.
asserted
writer → sue → Coghlan
He was duly awarded a mouth-watering half a million in damages, the equivalent of £1.5million today.
asserted
He → award → 1.5million
However, in July 2001, Archer was found guilty on two counts of perjury and two of perverting the course of justice during the 1987 trial and was sentenced to four years in prison.
When the perjury allegations first surfaced in 1999, the Sunday Telegraph led with the headline: ‘Jeffrey Archer destroyed.
asserted
Archer → find → headline
Indeed, Archer endured a public evisceration around the turn of the Millennium and was forced to stand down from the London Mayoralty race despite having decisively won the Tory candidacy.
asserted
Archer → endure → candidacy
…and 33 more, not listed.
The Aporia
