Fatal attraction – writers' and artists' obsession with the sea

From Shakespeare to Woolf, Turner to Gormley, Philip Hoare explores the eternal allure of the ocean‘The sea has many voices / Many gods and many voices,” TS Eliot wrote. “We cannot think of a time that is oceanless.” “In civilisations without boats,” Michel Foucault observed, “dreams dry up.” It is, plainly, a fluid state, a place of transition and transmutation; the place from which we all came.In the womb we swim in salty water, sprouting re