Reggie Oliver is a stage actor and playwright. His biography of Stella Gibbons was praised as "a triumph" by Hilary Spurling in the Daily Telegraph, his play Winner Takes All, was described as "the funniest evening in London", by Michael Billington in The Guardian, and his adaptation of Hennequin and Delacour's Once Bitten opened at the Orange Tree Theatre in London in December 2010. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE DAMNED: There was a time before the Great War when Petropol was the most fashionable resort in the Crimea. If you arrived by steamer, you would have disembarked onto a stone jetty that extended a long grey arm into the oily smooth waters of the Black Sea.