Authors: Adam Nicolson
Atlantic Britain (15 page)
‘Nicholson’s siren call to the wildness of the Western sea is so seductive, and his knowledge of every puffin nesting on every little volcanic outcrop so comprehensive, that I almost felt like joining him. Nicolson is the master of the art of worried travel writing … he has the genius of making you interested in something you’re not interested in.’
Spectator
‘Nicolson writes extremely well about the sea, but then he’s pretty good on dry land too … Nicolson realises that seamanship is not confined to the sea; its lessons apply any where.’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A dazzling triumph - a profound and magical account of a voyage along the wild edges of the British coast.’
NATHANIEL PHILBRICK
‘Adam Nicolson has written a classic of the sea; lucid, lyrical and lovely.’
BERNARD CORNWELL
‘This is a book to remember. Nicolson’s powers of description are prodigious … Nicolson has an endless curiosity about the natural world, the ability to describe it with vivid clarity and the talent for generalising from a particular but in a way that lodges in the mind and remains there. I can think of no higher tribute. This is a fine piece of writing. It’s a long time since I’ve read a book that describes quite so well the unique, rather strange relationship between seagoing men, their vessels and the sea.’
Scottish Sunday Herald
‘If, as an armchair traveller, your main requirement is a book that transports you to where the writer has been, Nicolson certainly comes up to the mark … instead of being directly spiritual and contemplative, it’s about the best way of engaging with life.’
Scotsman
‘Arrestingly narrated … he is extravagantly brilliant in description, especially of surfaces … A book that glitters and which allows you to glimpse, fascinated, what lies below.’
Tablet
‘Nicolson writes beautifully … both entertaining and enthralling.’
Irish Examiner
‘Its strength is its truthfulness. Voyages always make them selves in the end, and this was no exception. Nicolson is honest about shortcomings, thinks hard about what went wrong. And the book is a delight to read, written with panache and elegance, larded with a rich mix of sensitive description, phrases from Auden’s sea poems, legends of Celtic hermits and original similes.’
Independent
‘A genuinely intriguing, thoughtful work that vividly describes not only the author’s various thrills and spills at sea but his own quest to make sense of his life.’
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Harper Perennial
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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2004
1
First published as
Seamanship
by HarperCoilins
Publishers
in 2004
Copyright © Adam Nicolson 2004
Adam Nicolson asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN 0-00-718086-1
Set in PostScript Linotype Sabon by
Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd,
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
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EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-40270-0
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