When A Night to Remember was first published in the United States in 1955, Burke Wilkinson, in the New York Times, wrote that ‘the author’s style is so simple as to be almost an absence of style. But his great story needs no gilding, and he has given us that rarest of experiences—a book whose total effect is greater than the sum of its parts’. Stanley Walker of the New York Herald Tribune claimed that it was based on ‘a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader’.

When it was published in Britain in the following year, the reviewers were divided along political lines. In the Illustrated London News Sir John Squire, a poet and historian who had flirted with both Marxism and fascism in his time, found that Lord’s populist approach to disaster ‘slightly disgusts me’. The conservative Times thought that Lord had been unfair to the ship’s owner, Bruce Ismay, who had escaped from the disaster. The high loss of life among the poor steerage passengers, it was claimed, was due to shortage of lifeboats and not class distinction. To the left-wing New Statesman, the disaster was caused by ‘complacency and commercialism… the attempt of the White Star Line to wring the last penny out of the profitable Atlantic trade’. But most reviewers saw it as having all the elements of a Greek tragedy.