Think North Sea and what do you see? I see the dark, stormy and inconclusive Battle of Jutland, and many of us, I suspect, will summon to mind some such disturbing association. It is not one of your lyrical seas, where mermaids play. Tom Blass, however, has undertaken in this remarkable book to portray it in the round, winds and all, and thus makes a reassuring whole of it.

He covers it completely, in a rambling and sometimes demanding way, and I was relieved to find that his work is not of the trendy Thoreau-esque school of travel writing, but more down to earth. The book begins, indeed, with a workaday North Sea freighter crossing from the Humber to

Literary Review

Dec 2015

Categories

Jan Morris

Beautiful Patterns

Make Him a Smooth Eunuch or an Enamoured Swain

Impossible Not to Be a Bit Pleased with Himself

Rather Like Margaret

Wiped off the Map

Let It Blow

Forget the Fluff

Painting in Verse

Stanzas at the Summit

The Sun Will Set

My Little Town

Made in Mannahatta

It’s the Taking Part that Counts

Though the Open Door

Mammismo & Machismo

Kidnapped

Song of the Earth

In Potemkin’s Steps

Seeking His Quarry