The Several Lives Of Joseph Conrad
By John Stape
William Heinemann £20, 362 pages
FT bookshop price: £16

Joseph Conrad’s exceptionally adventurous life generated enduringly vivid literary depictions of political duplicity, human isolation and nature’s power. Of the numerous biographies of Conrad that have appeared over the years, the best, for a long time, was Jocelyn Baines’s Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (1960). This was concise, generally reliable and combined a balanced account of Conrad’s life with useful critical analyses of the works.