I rather like Tom Fort's stuff. He isn't an angling "expert," so he doesn't knack the job by milking every opportunity for self-promotion to the limit; he just is a rather good writer. His total lack of discrimination means that he gets as much fun fishing for salmon at Careysville as he does from eels on the chalk streams. Fort's writing brims over with enthusiasm, and at times his style is so similar to Ransome's that it is hard to imagine that the author of Rod and Line isn't pounding the typewriter again.

This book is a loose collection of tales that rattles around Europe, with a detour to Brazil and a spot check on the state of bison conservation. He goes fishless in Romania, shelters from Carpathian thunder, and then, turning a sudden corner, arrives at Annes Grove and the Awbeg, the incomparable Irish stream upon which I graduated as a dry fly fisherman. The characters are wonderful; and the chapters almost as badly organised as the author's fishing gear. There are frequent pauses while everything has to be disentangled before the story can lurch on to the next disaster. And storytelling it is; whether the quarry is the goliath tigerfish or the humble minnow, Fort writes with an easy charm.