The sea - this truth must be confessed - has no generosity. No display of manly qualities - courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness - has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

After many travails and vicissitudes at the beginning of November 1914 Conrad managed to bring his family back to England.

Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries. Lawrence F.