Nicholas John Turney Monsarrat was born in Liverpool, England, on 22 March 1910 to Keith Waldegrave and Marguerite Turney Monsarrat. His father, a distinguished surgeon, was dean of the faculty of medicine of Liverpool University, and Nicholas, his two sisters, and his younger brother were all raised in a large, comfortable house on a street that was occupied exclusively by doctors and known locally as "the Harley Street of the North." Monsarrat's life as a child was highly regimented and supervised, at first by his "very strict" mother, then later by a series of nurses and governesses who were employed to keep order in the children's rooms. As a young boy, Monsarrat tried to escape in a number of ways from what he was later to describe as "a life of cold security," but his only real relief came during his "cherished summer" when the family moved to a house...