Search results for ""author james hamilton-paterson""

A compelling and fascinating account of aerial combat in World War I, revealing the terrible risks run by the men who fought and died in the world's first air war. Little more than ten years after the first powered flight, aircraft were pressed into service in World War I. Yet the romantic image of gallant 'aces' belies the horrible reality of air warfare: of flimsy aircraft, of unprotected pilots with no parachutes; of burning 19-year-olds falling screaming to their deaths; of pilots freezing and disorientated as they flew across enemy lines. In this unforgettable book, bestselling author James Hamilton-Paterson reveals the brutal truths of wartime aviation and shows how those four years of fighting in the air would change the nature of warfare forever. 'For its mix of clear-eyed history, myth-busting and gobsmacking derring-do it's hard to beat James Hamilton Patterson's Marked for Death' Nick Curtis, Book of the Year in the Evening Standard

Read more less

Seven-Tenths is James Hamilton-Paterson's classic exploration of the sea. A beautifully-written blend of literature and science, it is here brought back into print in a revised and updated edition which includes the acclaimed essay Sea Burial.

Read more less

A lavishly illustrated celebration of the golden age of aircraft, cars, ships and locomotives from 1900 to 1941 by the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds. This dazzling book describes the flourishing of transport and travel, and the engineering that made it possible, in the years before the Second World War. It is an homage to the great vehicles and their mechanisms, their cultural impact and the social change they enabled. James Hamilton-Paterson explores the pinnacle of the steam engine, the advent and glory days of the luxury motorcar and the monster vehicles used in land speed records, the marvellous fast ocean liners and the excitement and beauty of increasingly aerodynamic forms of passenger aircraft. These were the days when for most people long-distance travel was a dream, and the dream-like glamour of these machines has never been surpassed. Hamilton-Paterson has an unrivalled ability to write evocatively about engineering and design in their historical context, and in this book he brings a vanished era to life.

Read more less

'One June day in 1953 aged twelve I sat in a classroom and drew a map.' The map that the young Hamilton-Paterson drew was of a tropical island, and it prefigured with uncanny accuracy the Philippine island on which, thirty years later, he would spend a full third of each year, entirely alone. It had a coral strand, a field of grass, vertical volcanic cliffs and no water. He survived by fishing and by drinking rainwater. This is a book about a remarkable and self-sufficient writer's 'desire to be lost', and the journey of a conventionally educated Englishman to an island on the far side of the world that aroused in him a feeling of discovering a place he always knew. Hamilton-Paterson writes with incomparable skill about the hard beauty of the sea, of coral reefs and the animals that live in them, and about the fishermen who eke a living among the labyrinth of islands that make up the Philippines.

Read more less

People hunting monkeys in the jungle once devised a simple yet effective trap: When the creature found a banana in a large jar with a narrow neck, it would plunge its paw in to retrieve it. But it couldn’t let go. And unless the monkey released the banana, it was stuck. We are, of course, the stuck monkey, paralysed by our modern lifestyles and consumer habits: our constant stream of online shopping deliveries, our compulsive dependence on digital devices, our obsession with our pets. These addictions, as small and harmless as they may seem, are quietly destroying the planet. And the eco-friendly alternatives that alleviate our guilt are often not much better. In Stuck Monkey, James Hamilton-Paterson uncovers the truth behind the everyday habits fuelling the climate crisis. Drawing on eye-opening research and shocking statistics, he mercilessly dissects a wide spectrum of modern life: pets, gardening, sports, vehicles, fashion, wellness, holidays, and more. Ferociously unflinching and intelligent, this book will make you think twice about the ‘innocent’ habits we often take for granted.

Read more less

'Exquisitely written and ripe with detail' Sunday Times. 'An engaging book... He knows his British stuff' The Times. 'One of England's most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of fiction, has done something even more original' London Review of Books. WHAT WE HAVE LOST IS A MISSILE AIMED AT THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT, A BLISTERING INDICTMENT OF POLITICIANS AND CIVIL SERVANTS, PLANNING AUTHORITIES AND FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS, WHO HAVE PRESIDED, SINCE 1945, OVER THE DECLINE OF BRITAIN'S INDUSTRIES AND REPLACED THE 'GREAT' IN BRITAIN WITH A FOR SALE SIGN HUNG AROUND THE NECK OF THE NATION. Between 1939 and 1945, Britain produced around 125,000 aircraft, and enormous numbers of ships, motor vehicles, armaments and textiles. We developed radar, antibiotics, the jet engine and the computer. Less than seventy years later, the major industries that had made Britain a global industrial power, and employed millions of people, were dead. Had they really been doomed, and if so, by what? Can our politicians have been so inept? Was it down to the superior competition of wily foreigners? Or were our rulers culturally too hostile to science and industry? James Hamilton-Paterson, in this evocation of the industrial world we have lost, analyzes the factors that turned us so quickly from a nation of active producers to one of passive consumers and financial middlemen.

Read more less

1961. A squadron of Vulcan aircraft, Britain's most lethal nuclear bomber, flies towards the east coast of the United States. Highly manoeuvrable, the great delta-winged machines are also equipped with state of the art electronic warfare devices that jam American radar systems. Evading the fighters scrambled to intercept them, the British aircraft target Washington and New York, reducing them to smoking ruins. They would have done, at least, if this were not an exercise. This extraordinary raid (which actually took place) opens James Hamilton-Paterson's remarkable novel about the lives of British pilots at the height of the Cold War, when aircrew had to be on call 24 hours a day to fly their nuclear-armed V-bombers to the Western USSR and devastate the lives of millions. This is the story of Squadron-Leader Amos McKenna, a Vulcan pilot who is suffering from desires and frustrations that are tearing his marriage apart and making him question his ultimate loyalties. Relations with the American cousins are tense; the future of the RAF bomber fleet is in doubt. And there is a spy at RAF Wearsby, who is selling secrets to his Russian handlers in seedy East Anglian cafes.A macabre Christmas banquet at which aircrew under intolerable pressures go crazy, with tragic consequences, and a dramatic and disastrous encounter with the Americans in the Libyan desert, are among the high points of a novel that surely conveys the beauty and danger of flying better than any other in recent English literature.

Read more less