It is an account of his life, in particular, his obsessive pursuit of a childhood love that encapsulates for him an ideal so pure that nothing must stand in the way of its resurrection.

An ode to the extreme sport of freediving, Deep is a memoir of both dangerous underwater stunts and the strange science of the abyss.

The author must have had a great deal of fun purposely amalgamating farce and improbability with high culture. Charles is the obvious candidate: his career is highly relevant, he controls the narrative we read, and towards the end, he says “ I was the dreamer, I the magician”.

And so Charles, redolent of Ebenezer Scrooge, lives in bleak solitude until he's visited by a succession of past lovers, theatre luvvies, and one mystical cousin – the ghosts of his immoderate past. All his friends ask him: How is someone like him, so used to the chaotic social scene of London’s theater world, seriously going to live in isolation in a small seaside village? The thunder made some sounds like grand pianos falling downstairs, then settled to a softer continuous rumble which was almost drowned by the sound of the rain. In this encyclopedic illustrated book of ocean life, Ellis documents over three billion years of aquatic evolutionary history in all its mystery and beauty.The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimise an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains.