Philip Hoare

"This fascination with the whale, like ’s report from Southampton Water, was an expression of Victorian fashion, a characteristic marriage of ingenious science and human curiosity. In England, live whales were delivered to aquaria in and (although one show was closed, for fear the flagrant activities of its performers should offend genteel dispositions), and in September 1877 a arrived in , in the centre of the world's greatest city."

"Behind me, bare s and es lie as cracks against the sky, evoking a peculiarly English landscape. In the late eighteenth century, drew the abbey's ruins in his sketchbook, tracing out the trees that had grown up around the crumbling gothic arches. In 1816 stayed at on his honeymoon, and painted its scudding clouds and billowing scenery. Theirs were records of a Romantic setting, an alternative reality of sensation and emotion. Hanging over the shore, the gnarled, enamelled branches are made darker by the reflected light of the sea and the stretch of bright shingle,"

"Hoare's Leviathan is part natural history, part literary criticism, part economics and part memoir but at its heart is the author's lifelong obsession for all things whale. ... He traces his love of whales to reading Moby-Dick and vividly recalls his first actual encounter with a at . Hoare now frequently travels to as a volunteer on a identification programme."

"… He moves from personal to literary history with muscular seamlessness (much as he did in the earlier books). We leap from Melville to Robert Louis Stevenson to the inevitable Byron; from Elizabeth Barrett Browning – “ in ” – to Sylvia Plath to Virginia Woolf. There are passages about Oscar Wilde and , both of whom Hoare addressed in earlier, rather lighter-hearted biographies. There’s some lovely stuff on Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen – “he looks like a boy you knew at school”. … … RisingTideFallingStar is about the author’s relationship to the sea, but then that could be said about both Leviathan and The Sea Inside. What changes with each subsequent book is that the authorial gaze becomes increasingly inward and self-revealing, the tone more forlorn, until some passages in RisingTideFallingStar attain an almost posthumous air, as if the book might also serve as a suicide note."