IT IS not every week that I get to think kindly about Lenin. Or about Trotsky, for that matter. Even, come to think of it, about certain personages in MI5 and MI6. I mean, it wouldn’t be, would it? Us fishing correspondents have plenty to do without getting mixed up in politics and revolutions and counter-intelligence, thank you.

Still, credit where credit is due. Had it not been for the foregoing, Arthur Ransome would not have been in the headlines last month, at first identified and then exonerated as a possible Bolshevik spy — and then I would have had no peg on which to hang my revelation about him.

Of course, it has long been known that the famous foreign correspondent and children’s author got close to the revolutionary leaders while reporting from Russia around 1917. And we can assume that he got a lot closer still to Trotsky’s secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, because he had an affair with her before the two eventually married.

Yet the fact that Ransome might, just might, have been a double agent was not aired until some of his private papers came to light three years ago. Now, the National Archive has released MI5 files relating to the time that Ransome reported from Russia, between 1913 and 1925. As before, these papers raised — and then appeared to knock down — the possibility that Ransome supplied information to the Bolsheviks. In fact, the conclusion appeared to be that, if Ransome was feeding intelligence to anyone, it was to the British Government.

These exotic possibilities will have come as a surprise to anyone who has sailed no closer to his work than Swallows and Amazons. What may surprise more is that Ransome is especially revered by anglers. Ransome was not only a lifelong angler who took his rods wherever he travelled, but the finest angling correspondent to write for any national newspaper in the 20th century. Although many aspects of Ransome’s life have been extensively chronicled, his work as an angling correspondent has been as submerged from view of late as split-shot beneath a float.

Fishing and fishermen stimulated some of Ransome’s finest writing and led to one of the most sought-after collections of essays in a sporting literature that goes back to 1496. It led to a second book of angling pieces compiled by the author himself and to a fine exploration of Ransome as both writer and angler by Jeremy Swift, Arthur Ransome on Fishing (1994).

Ransome was born in Leeds in 1884, the son of an angling professor of history who was the son of an angling father. Early family holidays were spent near Coniston, in the Lake District, walking, boating and learning to fish — experiences that were later to be deeply mined for his children’s books and which, between his travels, constantly drew him back.

From 1913 on, Ransome spent much of his time in Russia, writing the kinds of insider reports for the Daily News and The Observer that caused the security services to take an interest — and fishing wherever and whenever he could. He returned to Britain with Evgenia in 1925 and settled in the Lake District. The same year he began an angling column for the Manchester Guardian.

Between August that year and September 1929, Ransome produced 150 pieces, most of them as polished as gemstones. He wrote on people and places, tackle and trout, wet flies and the weather. He wrote on “Bulls and Kindred Phenomena”, on “Talking to the Fish”, on “Failing to Catch Tench” and on scores of other subjects. He wrote about them all with knowledge and insight and warmth and wry humour. He crafted every piece in a style that engaged the non-angling reader as well as the smitten.

Fifty of the best pieces, plus a translation of angling passages from Sergei Aksakov, the great chronicler of Russian life, appeared in Rod and Line (1929) — a book that Sir Michael Hordern, another keen angler, brought memorably to life in a television series for Channel 4 in 1983.

The opening sentence of the first piece in Rod and Line is a corker: “The pleasures of fishing are chiefly to be found in rivers, lakes and tackle shops and, of the three, the last are least affected by the weather.”

Among several later penetrating essays is one on the theme that angling is “a frank resumption of Palaeolithic life without the spur of Palaeolithic hunger”. In that piece, as often elsewhere, Ransome goes to the heart of it: “Escaping to the Stone Age by the morning train from Manchester, the fisherman engages in an activity that allows him to shed the centuries as a dog shakes off water and to recapture not his own youth merely, but the youth of the world.”

Ransome finally gave up his angling column when he decided that the pressure of producing it was beginning to take the edge off his fishing. He gave his editor three months’ notice of his intention to quit in March 1929. By May he was well into Swallows and Amazons.

Ransome fished — and on and off wrote about fishing — late into a life that was increasingly plagued by ill-health. He caught his last fish, a salmon, in 1960. By 1963 he was confined to a wheelchair. He died in 1967, aged 83. Among the papers he left were parts of a new novel. It had, like so much else in this public man’s private world, an underlying angling theme.

• Brian Clarke’s fishing column appears on the first Monday of each month.