Whether their material has been exhausted, or they have, very few writers reach old age at the top of their gameWhen I was doing my DPhil on Conrad, one of the seminal texts, (now, I suspect, largely unregarded) was Thomas Moser's Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline. I was innocently struck by his thesis that Conrad, after an apprentice period that covered the first couple of years of his writing life, then had a golden period (from 1897–1911) in which he produced a series of masterpieces, after which two indifferent books followed (Chance and Victory) and then a distinct falling off into the later works. This seemed to me, at the time, admirably observed and illustrated, and it did not occur ...