Charles R. Boxer. An Uncommon Life

(Lisbon: Fundação Oriente, 2001) 97278502305. 280 x 210 mm; pictorial wrappers; pp. 616, incl. index; plates. Merest trace of spotting to top edge; partial bibliography of Boxer's works loosely inserted; printed contents of two of his works mounted to final blank. Ever so slightly rubbed. Very good condition. Comprehensive biography of the outstanding English scholar of the Lusophone world. From the publisher's website: "Charles Ralph Boxer was born on the Isle of Wight in 1904. On his father's side, he was a descendant of an illustrious British family that had served in command positions in every British war since the French Revolution. While that family may have been of Huguenot origin, his mother's hailed from Scotland. Her forebears became successful pastoralists in nineteenth-century Tasmania and in Australia. As a young man who was the son of an officer who fell in France during World War I, Charles, like his elder brother, was destined to serve his country in its armed forces. In 1930, he fulfilled one of his ambitions when he was posted to Japan as a language officer. Having already studied French, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch, he improved his working knowledge of Japanese there and, after a stint in the War Office, became a Japanese-language intelligence officer in pre-war Hong Kong. Charles Boxer died peacefully in a nursing home a few miles from his country residence on 27 April 2000. He left us a very rich life as a soldier, historian, researcher, teacher, collector and traveler, being one of the great personalities of the 20th century, now exposed in this publication." .