As a very young naval officer at the end of the war, Alan Ross had the job of delivering a surrendered German U-boat into Russian hands in Tallinn. The German crew was inevitably reluctant, but Ross prevailed and saved their lives. Almost half a century later, he returns to Tallinn to complete a strange friendship that in the interim had developed with the U-boat commander.This revisitation of an old memory -- part wound, part inspiration -- opens the fourth volume of memoirs of one of England's outstanding literary figures. His earlier books have earned Ross -- known as a poet, critic, cricketer, and central figure in British literary life for half a century -- huge praise and many readers. As editor of the London Magazine for more than thirty years, he has been the first to publish a great many of England's best writers (Ian McEwan, William Boyd, Jonathan Raban) and a vast range of writers in other countries. Winter Sea introduces Ross's most recent discoveries alongside brilliant chapters on the Norwegian hero and poet Nordal Grieg and the German writer Ernst Junger. And, as with the earlier volumes, the narrative is enlivened and illustrated by the author's own poems.