User:Carlofantom

Carlofantom is the Wikimedia and Wikipedia username of the freelance journalist and non-fiction author Roger Bourke (http://www.amazon.com/author/rogerbourke).

The username itself is derived from a passage in the Brief Lives of the 17th-century English writer John Aubrey: "Captain Carlo Fantom, a Croatian, spake 14 languages; was a Captain under the Earle of Essex. He was very quarrelsome and a great Ravisher. He left the Parliament Party and went to the King Ch. the First at Oxford, where he was hanged for Ravishing. Sd. he, I care not for your Cause: I come to fight for your half-crowne and your handsome women … Sir Robert Pye was his Colonel, who shot at him for not returning a horse that he took away before the Regiment." "Carlo Fantom" ("Charles Ghost") was almost certainly not the real name of this East European mercenary but a nom de guerre: thus it was an early example of a username.

I published my first book, Prisoners of the Japanese: Literary imagination and the prisoner-of-war experience, with the University of Queensland Press in 2006. I am currently researching and writing a second, Wild Girl: The true story of the feral child Marie-Angélique. I hold an MA in English from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from the University of Western Australia. I am fluent in French. I live in Australia. I became a registered English Wikipedia user on 5 June 2013 and a registered French Wikipédia utilisateur on 1 September 2013. I own and administer the website http://www.marie-angelique.com.