Beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight, and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one's very heart - its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life.

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.