Torchlit walks, hillside candlelit poetry readings, maypole dancing - it can only be the bi-annual festival of Gothickry that is the Coleridge Summer Conference

'On reaching the water-side, a spectacle at once sublime and appalling busrt upon my eye – St. Stephen’s Chapel in flames, with the House of Lords a little further to the south, and (the sensation which I felt at the sight as an antiquary and a British subject, I shall not easily forget) the gable of Westminster Hall, contiguous to the fire, apparently alight in two or three places! –'

I am deeply fascinated at the moment by nineteenth-century Gothic sea fiction, particularly its phantoms, wrecks, and derelicts. The long nineteenth-century, as we know, saw tremendous social, industrial, and scientific developments, including the replacement of wooden sailing ships by steel and steam. The ghosts of the Age of Sail still haunted our seas; wooden derelicts trapped in the currents accounted for many a phantom ship sighting, says Margaret Baker, yet by the 1930s, these were all destroyed. These ghosts remain in our literature, and in our film.