Trains, Planes, Ships and Cars

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.

“PRAISE FOR JAMES HAMILTON-PATERSON : 'One of England's most skilled and alluring prose writers in or out of fiction' London Review of Books . 'A book that is by turns engrossing and infuriating - a response to Brexit in mechanical form' Evening Standard , on What We Have Lost . 'Exquisitely written and ripe with detail, James Hamilton-Paterson explores one disaster story after another' Sunday Times , on What We Have Lost . 'He writes beautifully' Literary Review .”

Airships and electric cars take centre stage in this fascinating transport book Scotsman
Lavishly illustrated with wonderful photographs... Unusually for this type of picture book, it is elegantly written, by somene who has an easy command of his subject, and firm opinions. It is the opposite of bland' Mail on Sunday
This book is full of extraordinary images and bizarre facts – barely a page goes by without some amazing form of transport, whether real or imagined Yorkshire Post
Hamilton-Paterson describes the extraordinary progress made in each individual category of transport This England
Transports the reader back to an era when travel really was the stuff of dreams – for both the man in the street, and the man behind the drawing board On Yorkshire Magazine

James Hamilton-Paterson is one of Britain's most versatile writers. He won a Whitbread Prize for his novel Gerontius and is the author of Marked for Death, Eroica and Blackbird.

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