Here are 100 books that The Birth of British Aviation fans have personally recommended if you like
The Birth of British Aviation.
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My passion for flying old aeroplanes led me to the pilots who flew them in history, and my particular fascination is with the interwar period and the ‘Golden Age of Aviation’, which saw the establishment of the early commercial air routes and the historic solo flights by pilots flying basic machines and pushing themselves and their aircraft to the very limits of endurance to prove that it could be done. I was absolutely mesmerised by the stories of their bravery and obsession. My recommended books all share the theme of pioneering aviation as this has been a consuming interest for much of my adult life, both in and out of the cockpit.
First published in 1961, this memoir may be the best book ever written about aviation by someone who was both a pilot and a terrific writer.
I took the liberty of using this title as the heading for one of the chapters in my own book as a tribute to Gann. His visceral accounts of flying the early airliners in America during the 1930s in the burgeoning years of commercial aviation are literally heart-stopping.
We take so much for granted in this modern age of airline flying but this wonderful book will forever change your perspective of the risks and challenges that went before.
Ernest K. Gann’s classic pilot's memoir is an up-close and thrilling account of the treacherous early days of commercial aviation. “Few writers have ever drawn readers so intimately into the shielded sanctum of the cockpit, and it is hear that Mr. Gann is truly the artist” (The New York Times Book Review).
“A splendid and many-faceted personal memoir that is not only one man’s story but the story, in essence, of all men who fly” (Chicago Tribune). In his inimitable style, Gann brings you right into the cockpit, recounting both the triumphs and terrors of pilots who flew when flying…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
My passion for flying old aeroplanes led me to the pilots who flew them in history, and my particular fascination is with the interwar period and the ‘Golden Age of Aviation’, which saw the establishment of the early commercial air routes and the historic solo flights by pilots flying basic machines and pushing themselves and their aircraft to the very limits of endurance to prove that it could be done. I was absolutely mesmerised by the stories of their bravery and obsession. My recommended books all share the theme of pioneering aviation as this has been a consuming interest for much of my adult life, both in and out of the cockpit.
Originally released in 1967, a new edition of this book was published by Daredevil in 2021.
Amy Johnson’s story has great personal resonance for me and I was very honoured to write a preface for the book. With less than a hundred hours in her logbook, Amy set out to Australia to break the world record for the fastest time in 1930 and what would become one of the most outstanding solo achievements in history.
My own flight to Australia in 2015/16 re-tracing Amy’s route was done in homage.
Amy Johnson became a household name after her solo flight to Australia in 1930 which thrust her, ill-prepared and exhausted, into the limelight and almost constant media attention for the rest of her short life. She was to die in mysterious circumstances in 1941 crashing into the sea off Herne Bay. Lauded at the time as 'Amy, wonderful Amy', her achievements have captivated us ever since.
Constance Babington Smith was given access to all of Amy Johnson's private papers by the Johnson family and asked to write a posthumous account of the life of this most enigmatic heroine. Babington Smith's…
My passion for flying old aeroplanes led me to the pilots who flew them in history, and my particular fascination is with the interwar period and the ‘Golden Age of Aviation’, which saw the establishment of the early commercial air routes and the historic solo flights by pilots flying basic machines and pushing themselves and their aircraft to the very limits of endurance to prove that it could be done. I was absolutely mesmerised by the stories of their bravery and obsession. My recommended books all share the theme of pioneering aviation as this has been a consuming interest for much of my adult life, both in and out of the cockpit.
This is about one of our most brilliant female aviators.
Largely forgotten today, the Irish Lady Heath, one of our first female Olympians and the first woman in Britain to hold a commercial pilot’s licence, was also the first person to fly solo from Cape Town to England in 1928.
Her flight was the inspiration for my first expedition up Africa in 2013, about which we made a documentary screened by the BBC, and this book is the moving story of Mary Heath’s exceptional but ultimately tragic life.
My passion for flying old aeroplanes led me to the pilots who flew them in history, and my particular fascination is with the interwar period and the ‘Golden Age of Aviation’, which saw the establishment of the early commercial air routes and the historic solo flights by pilots flying basic machines and pushing themselves and their aircraft to the very limits of endurance to prove that it could be done. I was absolutely mesmerised by the stories of their bravery and obsession. My recommended books all share the theme of pioneering aviation as this has been a consuming interest for much of my adult life, both in and out of the cockpit.
This is a lively history of the first 200 years of British women in the sky.
Given that women were largely blocked by a hostile male establishment from participating in commercial and military aviation for most of the 20th century, this is a riveting account of the unconventional women who defied gravity and everything else to get airborne. Marvellous stuff!
Just eighteen months after two Frenchmen made the world's first ever flight, a fearless British woman hopped into a flimsy balloon and flew across the London sky for nearly an hour. Since then, many other remarkable British women have decided to defy traditional society and follow their dreams to get into the sky. Magnificent Women and Flying Machines tells the stories of the pioneers who achieved real firsts in various forms of aviation: in ballooning, parachuting, gliding, airships and fixed-wing flight - right up to a trip to the International Space Station! Full of entertaining adventure mixed with a wealth…
I had finished The Bluebird Trilogy, three novels that centred on the first half of the Second World War, and I heard echoes of the Great War ringing faintly in the egos of my older characters. I started to read more of the history and was drawn to the aerial maelstrom that befell the RFC over Arras in 1917. I was also interested in working with a larger cast of characters, many transients, and telling their stories over a short stretch of time. The result was Major Claypole and Jackdaw Squadron, Glory Boys every last one.
Barely a decade after The Wright brothers’ first tentative take-off, flying machines were thrown into the scorching crucible of war in Europe. The men who flew them were pioneers, members of what many saw as a military flying club. But the flying club soon developed into a bear-pit of mortal combat, fought behind synchronised machine guns without the solace of a parachute. Levine paints his pictures with the personal accounts and anecdotes of the pilots that fought these battles, seeking to understand the feelings and motivations of the young men who volunteered to risk all in the frightening new theatre of aerial warfare. These truths, are in many instances, stranger than fiction, forged, as they were, on the cutting edge of the new aviation technology.
Rewriting the rules of military engagement and changing the course of modern history as a result, the pioneering airmen of the First World War took incredible risks to perform their vital contribution to the war effort.
Fighter Heroes of WWI is a narrative history that conveys the perils of early flight, the thrills of being airborne, and the horrors of war in the air at a time when pilots carried little defensive armament and no parachutes.
The men who joined the Royal Flying Corps in 1914 were the original heroes of…
I've been drawn to the experience of women on the home front since, at the age of seven, I witnessed my grandmother’s raw, unprocessed grief at the death of her favourite brother. Later, I read accounts by women and men caught up in that war who all displayed a breathtaking degree of selflessness. This novel is my homage to them. It meant a lot to me to write it, prompting tears several times while I typed. Evocatively written about sensitive issues, I wanted to capture the emotional toll that bravery involves and to write about the characters’ experiences with empathy and love. I hope it is a book you can curl up with.
Although my novel is set mainly on the home front, it starts in no man’s land and the trenches and returns to the front a few more times to demonstrate how close the links were between the home and war fronts. I wanted these passages to be realistic and needed facts, details, and knowledge from which to write.
I read John Lewis-Stempel’s meticulously researched book because it focuses on the experiences of Subalterns—young men who were made officers while they were often still at school. I found it moving, harrowing, and shocking—a book that stayed with me because it showed the impossibility of performing that role and surviving more than a few weeks. It proved invaluable for the first chapter of the book which is entitled The Subaltern.
The extraordinary story of British junior officers in the First World War, who led their men out of the trenches and faced a life expectancy of six weeks.
During the Great War, many boys went straight from the classroom to the most dangerous job in the world - that of junior officer on the Western Front. Although desperately aware of how many of their predecessors had fallen before them, nearly all stepped forward, unflinchingly, to do their duty. The average life expectancy of a subaltern in the trenches was a mere six weeks.
In this remarkable book, John Lewis-Stempel focuses…
An Heir of Realms tells the tale of two young heroines—a dragon rider and a portal jumper—who fight dragon-like parasites to save their realms from extinction.
Rhoswen is training as a Realm Rider to work with dragons and burn away the Narxon swarming into her realm. Rhoswen’s dream is to…
The list reflects my interest in history and my own recollections of the days before the current era of mass tourism and online globalisation. I confess to a feeling of painful nostalgia for a time when we all had a very different worldview, and these books are all of that period. They feature temporal grief for an age that has passed. They are all highly readable books by writers at the top of their game.
The best novel ever about WWI. I was there with them in the trenches and finally understood how the generals came to have the mentality that allowed the slaughter to continue.
Forester is a superb writer and grossly underrated. He is a model for any aspiring writer. I must have read it four times at least, and each time found some new aspect to enjoy.
The book John Kelly reads every time he gets a promotion to remind him of 'the perils of hubris, the pitfalls of patriotism and duty unaccompanied by critical thinking'
The most vivid, moving - and devastating - word-portrait of a World War One British commander ever written, here re-introduced by Max Hastings.
C.S. Forester's 1936 masterpiece follows Lt General Herbert Curzon, who fumbled a fortuitous early step on the path to glory in the Boer War. 1914 finds him an honourable, decent, brave and wholly unimaginative colonel. Survival through the early slaughters in which so many fellow-officers perished then…
I am a historian of diplomacy, war, and empire. A founding editor ofThe International History Review, I have written books on ‘Imperial Diplomacy’, on the origins of the First World War, and on the July Crisis.I have edited: the 5-volume Encyclopedia of War andthe 4-volumeEncyclopedia of Diplomacy; the journals of A.L. Kennedy for the Royal Historical Society; numerous collections of essays, and the multi-volume Seminar Studies in History series. I am currently working on a two-volume study of Political Intelligence in Great Britain, 1900-1950, which is a group biography of the men who made up the Department of Political Intelligence in Britain, 1917-1919
The First World War broke out in August 1914; by September 1914 articles and essays began to appear that defended – or attacked – the policies of the men responsible for the July Crisis. Books soon followed. And they have never stopped. No crisis in history has received more attention than that of July 1914. The topic, with its vast complexities, missed opportunities, and contradictory explanations, continues to fascinate us.
No book on the subject is more captivating than Thomas Otte’s day-by-day unravelling of the complicated diplomacy pursued by the statesmen of Europe. His mastery of the subject is impressive (he has written dozens of articles and essays on the diplomacy of prewar Europe) and his balanced treatment of the topic serves as a model of dispassionate scholarship.
This is a magisterial new account of Europe's tragic descent into a largely inadvertent war in the summer of 1914. Thomas Otte reveals why a century-old system of Great Power politics collapsed so disastrously in the weeks from the 'shot heard around the world' on June 28th to Germany's declaration of war on Russia on August 1st. He shows definitively that the key to understanding how and why Europe descended into world war is to be found in the near-collective failure of statecraft by the rulers of Europe and not in abstract concepts such as the 'balance of power' or…
As a not well-known writer of science fiction, that grew up reading speculative fiction novels by not very well-known authors, I want to shine a light on the more obscure corners of my bookshelf. Neil Gaiman and Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Jordan get plenty of press. They don’t need any help. This is a list of authors that I don’t think enough people are talking about. And it’s a shame, because all of them have a lot of really interesting worlds to explore. Enjoy.
I’m a huge Philip K. Dick fan. I read an article where PKD said that A.E. van Vogt was his favorite author, but I’d never even heard the name before. Then, everywhere I went for about a month – barbershops, thrift stores, coffee shops – there was an A.E. van Vogt book laying around. Which is something that would happen in a PKD novel, but more sinister. If you like the otherwordly, discombobulating feeling of reading Flow My Tears the Policeman Said or A Scanner Darkly, you’ll enjoy The World of Null-A.
Grandmaster A.E. Van Vogt was one of the giants of the Gold Age of classic SF, the 1940's. Of his masterpieces, THE WORLD OF NULL-A is most famous and most influential. It was the first major trade SF hardcover ever, published in 1949, and has been in print in various editions ever since. The careers of Philip K Dick, Keith Laumer, Alfred Bester, Charles Harness and Philip Jose Farmer were created or influenced by THE WORLD OF NULL-A. It is required reading for anyone who wishes to know the canon of SF classics.
A poisonous maiden, a Daoist sex cult, and a violent insurgency.
The polyandrous Yan family in China's rural Shaanxi Province takes in two carpenter brothers. When one brother is convicted of murder after killing their neighbor in a dispute, a constable threatens to expose the family's rumored polyandry and extorts…
Once upon a time, I didn’t know any stories from Africa. I found one, and it stirred me to my core. I found others and read them to my children. These were oral stories that had been trapped between the covers of books. One day, I discovered the oral tradition – stories told as they were originally heard. They had been liberated from the page and flew into my heart. A storyteller was born in me. I went on my own journey to collect stories in Ghana. I now tell stories from traditions around the world.
This wonderful South African storyteller enchanted me when I heard her telling stories at the Toronto Storytelling Festival. I loved the empowering story, "Khethiwe, Queen of the Imbira", about a girl who defiantly plays an instrument claimed as the exclusive purview of men. Another is the story of a woman who must go to the depths of the ocean to bring the magic of stories to the world. These, with eight other beautifully told tales, are included in a colourfully illustrated book.
This folklore story collection offers a feast of enjoyment for young South African readers. Ten enchanting tales, steeped in the imaginative richness of African storytelling: Where did the first stories in the world come from? How did little Tortoise win the respect of all the other animals? Who was Nanana Bo Sele Sele and what happened when she built her house in the middle of the animals' road? Why was young Crocodile so determined to get hold of Monkey's heart? Told with inimitable aplomb by South Africa's most popular performance storyteller and illustrated by a lively selection of KwaZulu-Natal artistic…
