With its northern fogs and southern gales, its icebergs, currents and tides, explorers and battles, and its influence on literature, weather and trade, the Atlantic Ocean is the most important of the world's five oceans in terms of human affairs. Telling the story of "the classic ocean of our imaginings" is a huge undertaking but Simon Winchester manages it with aplomb. To condense his subject into manageable chunks, Mr Winchester uses Shake- speare's seven ages of man as a structure: the infant is a metaphor for man's first interest in the ocean, the schoolboy represents its exploration, and so on.
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