A Personal Record and The Mirror of the Sea, by Joseph Conrad (Penguin, £5.99 in UK)

Conrad was a private and fastidious man, and though these works are autobiographical, they contain little genuine self-revelation. Like a true Belle Epoque man of letters, he preserves decorum but was too much of an artist and raconteur ever to be dull. The first part contains a good deal of material about his native Poland (then under the rule of the Czars) but is extremely discursive. The second deals mainly with Conrad's seafaring years and shows his love for ships and the sea, the theme of most of his major fiction. English was only his third language, after Polish and French, which may explain something exotic and definitely un-English in his elaborate, full-dress prose style.