And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

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.