AustLit

'Precisely why the story of the Titanic continues to exercise such a powerful hold on the collective imagination is a fascinating question. The answer lies, at least in part, in the way it simultaneously enacts and contradicts a series of fantasies about the passing of the Gilded Age, setting the hubris of the ship’s owners’ claims about its unsinkability against the images of doomed nobility and chivalry that are embodied in the image of the band playing on as the ship slid beneath the waves... Dyer isn’t the first writer to venture into this territory, although as a former ship’s officer and lawyer who spent many years working in the London firm that represented the Titanic’s owners, he may be the most qualified' (James Bradley).