Lord does not deal with the issue of race, which was about to engulf the United States and, to a lesser extent, Britain. Many British shipping lines employed Africans and Asians as firemen, stewards and seamen, but not White Star. Almost everyone aboard the Titanic, both passengers and crew, was white (though there is casual mention of Chinese and Japanese) and racialism, which was an essential and largely unspoken feature of 1912 society, was directed against what were considered the ‘lesser’ European races such as the Italians.

Lord begins his story with the first sighting of the iceberg, and the world outside the ship appears only incidentally, increasing the feeling of peril and claustrophobia among those on board. He portrays the sinking as a slow-motion disaster, with its extent dawning on crew and passengers only by degrees. As he wrote in 1987, part of the appeal of the story relies on ‘the initial refusal to believe that anything was wrong—card games continued in the smoking room; playful soccer matches on deck with chunks of ice broken off from the berg. Then the gradual dawning that there is real danger—the growing tilt of the deck, the rockets going off. And finally, the realization that the end is at hand, with no apparent escape.’ Lord also starts with different levels in the ship—the lookout at the head of the mast, the officers on the bridge, the passengers in the saloons and the firemen down in the engine room. He explores the alternative hierarchies on board—the normal social one and the sea discipline, with officers commanding seamen, who in turn are nominally in charge of the passengers in a lifeboat—though in real life they were often challenged successfully by the first-class passengers, who believed they had a right to rule in any circumstances.

When he mentions it at all, Lord portrays the world outside the Titanic as a very stable one, only ended in later years by war and taxation, but it is worth remembering that Britain was in turmoil at the time, with militant suffragettes, very bitter strikes and Ireland on the verge of rebellion.