The Sea Inside

‘As bracing as a great blustery lungful of ozone-filled air … Hoare has wonderful, almost child-like relish for colourful stories and incredible facts … His passionate engagement will infect you. As you close this book, you will probably feel as ecstatic as the author does after one of his cold morning dips.’ Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times
‘A beautifully written mixture of travelogue and essay … Hoare has invented a new genre: an elegy for something not yet lost.’ David Evans, Independent on Sunday
‘A passionate, wonderfully engaging book … His oceanic pursuit of the most remarkable animals on the planet has produced two books of the utmost interest.’ Christopher Hirst, Independent
‘Everything he writes is remarkably interesting, and always expressed in his singular prose, at the one and the same time both exact and numinous … Hoare’s enthusiasms are boundless … packed full of strange delights – perhaps a bit of a ragbag, but what rags! And what a bag!’ Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday ****
‘A grand cabinet of natural curiosities … The pace is exhilarating. The learning is profound. The surprises are tumultuous and the simple love of nature, in all its forms … is a delight.’ Jan Morris, Sunday Telegraph
‘Ceaselessly fascinating … In flowing, liquid prose, Hoare is drawn back and forth from story to story, place to place … This is a magnificent book.’ Carl Wilkinson, Financial Times
‘A profound and lyrical love affair.’ Bella Bathurst, Observer
‘Hoare weaves together stories of magic, faith and fear, of wilderness, destruction, mortality and nature’s often savage beauty … This is a work where it pays to go with the flow.’
Gerard Henderson, Daily Express ****
‘Glorious stuff.’ Caspar Henderson, Guardian
‘The pace is exhilarating. The learning is profound’ Telegraph

Philip Hoare is the author of six works of non-fiction: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990) and Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), and England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005). Leviathan or, The Whale (2008), won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. Most recently, The Sea Inside (2013) was published to great critical acclaim.

An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honourary doctorate in 2011.

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