There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten - before the end is told - even if there happens to be any end to it.

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.