For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

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.