"… 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."