it's a family affair

Hot on the heels of the revelations of my distant claim to the Stapledon millions comes even more exciting news: following an exchange of e-mails with my aunt (who is well into all this ancestry stuff) I can now reveal the full tangled web of family literary connections - here's an updated and expanded family tree:

Clickage will embiggen if it's all getting a bit difficult to read; obviously the bit I'm going to be suggesting you focus your attention on is the bit at the bottom right wherein it is revealed that your actual Jeffrey Flippin' Archer and me are fourth cousins once removed. If you have a look at the chart at the bottom of Archer's Wikipedia page you'll notice that it has his great-grandfather being called Robert Clibbett whereas I have him as Richard Clibbet (on my aunt's say-so). There are several variant spellings of Clibbet (for instance Olaf Stapledon's Wikipedia page renders it as Clibbert), but I can't account for the disagreement over the first name.

It's very easy to scoff at Jeffrey Archer, and I'm not necessarily saying you shouldn't - a serial liar, fantasist and philanderer, to be sure, and no-one would make any great claims of literary merit for the books - but for all that I did read and heartily enjoy some of his novels when I was in my teens, mainly the two big doorstops Kane And Abel and First Among Equals. Anyway, now I know we're related, watch yourself with the criticism, 'cause it's faaaaaahhhhmly, innit. You slaaaaag.