Joseph Conrad, who was born in the Ukraine in 1857, brought up in Poland and schooled in the merchant marine, died near Canterbury in 1924, having become the major British novelist of the period 1895-1920. John Batchelor's important new biography of this most extraordinary, enigmatic figure reveals the especially close relationship between the life and the work, and shows Conrad to have been one of the most tormented and self-defeating of our literary figures.