TO CATCH THE MOON FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA: A MEMOIR. By Peter McEwan.

2009 1st edition. 8vo (150 x 228mm). Ppx,234. Colour and b/w photographs. Dark blue cloth, spine titled in gilt.

"Starting out married life looking after Large Whites and Wessex Saddlebacks near Loch Ness in Scotland, he tried refining Shetland ponies' urine for use in cosmetics. The latter sideline proved as unfruitful as his attempts to establish whether the ivy-clad lodge occupied by the McEwan family was haunted by a tormented former owner. The unexplained sightings have passed into the annals of the paranormal, captured on film by the BBC. In the late 1950s, McEwan abandoned the Highlands and took academic posts in Norther and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe), followed by New York State and Harvard. His observations of American life and political correctness continue to carry resonance. An original thinker, it is as an academic that McEwan has made his mark, pioneering understandings between the sciences. His work has influenced generations of social scientists. While at Harvard he founded the multi-disciplinary International Journal of Social Science, a professional and commercial success in academic publishing, acknowledged as the pre-eminent journal of its kind in the world. He later helped establish the Centre for Social Research at the fledgling University of Sussex - a task requiring equal measures of tact, diplomacy and patience. McEwan has made waves outside academia too. The McEwan Gallery art dealership, established with his wife Dorothy 47 years ago, specialising in fine 19th and 20th century art, discovered half of a lost Thomas Gainsborough double portrait - only to have their claim dismissed by the art establishment. The couple were later vindicated when the missing part of the painting was identified and the halves reunited. Beyond McEwan's career, however, is his humanity. 'I have always found it easier to recall the good things than remember the bad, to recollect happy events and good people rather than remember the disappointments and the disagreeable,' he says".