Read more ‘This history of man’s dealings with whales is respectful, even mystical.’ Daily Mail ‘A scintillating, scattershot, blunderbuss of a book. In the end, Hoare’s virtuosic sympathy for his subject makes you believe in the better angels of our nature.’ Alex Ross, bestselling author of ‘The Rest is Noise’.

‘This singular, magnificent book inspires both awe and shame – awe of the whales, shame of the human species that has tried to destroy them.

More than the story of the whale, it is also the story of our own obsessions. This book is an investigation into what we know little about – dark, shadowy creatures who swim below the depths, only to surface in a spray of spume. What impelled Melville to write ‘Moby-Dick’? After his book in 1851, no one saw whales in quite the same way again. Read more In ‘Leviathan’, Philip Hoare seeks to locate and identify this obsession. Whales have a mythical quality – they seem to elide with dark fantasies of sea-serpents and antediluvian monsters that swim in our collective unconscious.

All his life, Philip Hoare has been obsessed by whales, from the gigantic skeletons in London’s Natural History Museum to adult encounters with the wild animals themselves. The story of a man’s obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey – from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching. The story of a man's obsession with whales, which takes him on a personal, historical and biographical journey - from his childhood to his fascination with Moby-Dick and his excursions whale-watching. Description for Leviathan or The Whale Paperback.

Serious Pleasures by Philip Hoare