IT’S been done before, but lifeboats will forever exert a strong spell. A former PR director for the RNLI for 16 years, the author deals principally with a dozen or so heroic rescues.

The fact that none is closer to the North-East than off the Humber underlines what must have been an agony of choice. But it is impossible not to wonder why, in his broader picture, the author devotes space to such relative non-events as the launch of the Scarborough boat in 2007, to a surfer who managed to scramble ashore himself, and why the Whitby boat’s attempt, also in 2007, to save the occupants of a cabin cruiser is featured in preference to either the town’s epic 1861 lifeboat disaster or the later overland launch from Robin Hood’s Bay, achieved after a route had been hacked through snowdrifts. Even the 1914 rescue from the hospital ship Rohilla, an astonishing combined effort, in which the Tynemouth boat, voyaging in darkness to Whitby, proved the value of a motor-powered lifeboat, earns only a few lines. Still, parochial carping is difficult to justify in the face of the heart-stopping bravery that throbs through these pages.