Bøker av James Hamilton-Paterson

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 ourpets. 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 andintelligent, this book will make you think twice about the 'innocent' habits we often take for granted.

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.

An illustrated celebration of the golden age of aircraft, cars and locomotives from 1900 to 1945.

James Hamilton-Paterson turns his literary and analytical skills to the wider picture of Britain's lost industrial and technological civilisation.

This brilliant sequence of short stories, first published in 1995, sees James Hamilton-Patterson serving up fables and fictions on creativity, tradition and loss, all of them linked by the love of music and underpinned by a musical theme. An escaped lunatic who thinks he is Schumann interrupts a quiet family picnic; a Croat refugee gifted at the guitar enters and unsettles a woman's life; and a Chinese master-teacher struggles with a pupil who would dare to modify a musical canon. 'Written in a wide range of voices... (these tales) reveal an imagination as wide-ranging as it is dazzling. Astonishingly versatile... extremely funny.' Christina Patterson, Independent 'Beautiful, eerie, witty, astute, dazzling.' Observer 'As perfect a collection of short stories as you're ever likely to come across.' Paul Sussman, Independent on Sunday

In 1945 Britain was the world's leading designer and builder of aircraft - a world-class achievement that was not mere rhetoric. And what aircraft they were. The sleek Comet, the first jet airliner. The awesome delta-winged Vulcan, an intercontinental bomber that could be thrown about the sky like a fighter. The Hawker Hunter, the most beautiful fighter-jet ever built and the Lightning, which could zoom ten miles above the clouds in a couple of minutes and whose pilots rated flying it as better than sex.How did Britain so lose the plot that today there is not a single aircraft manufacturer of any significance in the country? What became of the great industry of de Havilland or Handley Page? And what was it like to be alive in that marvellous post-war moment when innovative new British aircraft made their debut, and pilots were the rock stars of the age?James Hamilton-Paterson captures that season of glory in a compelling book that fuses his own memories of being a schoolboy plane spotter with a ruefully realistic history of British decline - its loss of self confidence and power. It is the story of great and charismatic machines and the men who flew them: heroes such as Bill Waterton, Neville Duke, John Derry and Bill Beaumont who took inconceivable risks, so that we could fly without a second thought.

In 1986 the overthrow of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos by Cory Aquino's 'People Power' revolution focused global attention on the Philippines. Western media took their lead from the US, and the untrammelled denigration of the fleeing dictator and his wife served to tarnish the Philippines more generally. James Hamilton-Paterson, who knew the Philippines well having lived there for some years, resolved in America's Boy (1998) to examine the Marcoses more closely - not to exonerate them but, rather, to explain the political and social roots of their regime, sustained for so long by support from Washington.'The ultimate book about the national character of the Philippines... both a history and a psychoanalysis of a whole people, a socio-political tour de force.' Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, Malaya'Every page displays Hamilton-Paterson's mastery of his material... required reading for anyone interested in the enduring impact of U.S. policy in the Philippines.' Publishers Weekly

James Hamilton-Paterson's first collection of stories was published in 1986: in a prefatory note the author claims inspiration from the 'putative memory' of a Cynic philosopher whose 'brilliant crabbiness' saw him exiled to the foothills of the titular Mount Dog. The collection that follows is a disquietingly humorous volume which tilts the reader's perception of the world just sufficiently as to make the bizarre seem ordinary and the mundane utterly extraordinary.What is happening in a world where a 41-year-old scriptwriter who despises sport becomes the greatest athlete who ever lived, and the Virgin Mary tangles with the Peace Corps? From England to the Philippines, from the Middle East to South America, the stories contained herein portray a world far stranger and less governed than we might care to admit.

The Bell-Boy was James Hamilton-Paterson's third novel, first published in 1990.'Somewhere on my tropical travels I encountered a rickety hotel on whose roof an ancient servant lived in a converted hen coop. This gave me the idea for a young bell-boy, Laki, who is up from the provinces and lives on top of his hotel in the holy city of Malomba. He moonlights as a shrewd guide for foreign visitors, his latest clients being a hippie English family who are in Malomba for psychic surgery. Their mutual exploitation leads to both farce and minor tragedy.' James Hamilton-Paterson'A brilliant religious satire with elements of E.F. Benson and Evelyn Waugh... Few books since E.M. Forster's A Passage to India (whose formal perfection this novel shares) have conveyed more intensely the allure (and the revulsion) the East holds for Westerners.' New York Times

A Very Personal War, first published in 1971, was James Hamilton-Paterson's first non-fiction book, and though out of print for many years it retains its force and relevance today.'In 1969 my agent called me into his office to meet a mysterious man who wanted his story told. He was Cornelius Hawkridge, who had escaped from Hungary during the 1956 uprising and had gone to America. He had recently returned from Vietnam, where for some years he had been conducting a bull-headed one-man investigation into the wholesale theft in South East Asia of US construction material, the corrupt practices of major US contractors supplying the military, and an international money-changing scam... But few wished to know: any negative news about the war in Vietnam qualified as 'rocking the boat'... In 1970 I holed up with him on the island of Gozo for some weeks while he told his story.' James Hamilton-Paterson

Griefwork, James Hamilton-Paterson's third novel, was first published in 1993.'This book had its genesis in a vivid dream about a Holland-like landscape of dykes which caused me to catch the next plane to Amsterdam. The story is set in the tropical palm house of a botanical garden - possibly in the Netherlands - just after the Second World War. Its single-minded and distinctly odd curator, Leon, has brought his precious ark of exotic plants safely through the war but is now struggling amid the snows of winter to keep its boilers going in fuel-starved Europe.' James Hamilton-Paterson'Beautifully written. The author explores the tangled roots of his subject with brains and imagination, sustaining a tautness between Leon's affirmation of nature and the creeping truth that will expose its provisionality.' Observer'Hamilton-Paterson's strange and compelling novel puts down enduring roots in the reader's mind.' Sunday Times

'James Hamilton-Paterson's excoriating book would be unbearably painful were it not so beautifully written. The clarity of his vision and the lucid elegance of his prose - lightened by flashes of gallows humour - make this one of the most extraordinary and powerful novels I have read for years.' Literary ReviewGhosts of Manila (first published in 1994) begins in a wasteland near Manila Airport where a small family business works at boiling down the cadavers of police death squad victims and re-assembling them as skeletons for sale to medical students. The novel's urban drama then opens out to bring in burned-out British journalist John Prideaux, archaeologist and diplomat's daughter Ysabella Bastiaan streetwise but rueful policeman Rio Dingca, and Epifania Tigos, who struggles to run a sewing co-operative from within a shantytown. 'It is the author's remarkable achievement that the city, in all its ragged splendour, continues to haunt the mind even after the last page of the book is finished.' Sunday Telegraph

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.

Nearing the end of his career, an impulsive Sir Edward Elgar decides to travel by ship to Brazil, where he encounters a woman from his past. Based on true events, Gerontius is a modern classic, and takes the great composer out of his depths in this beautiful, episodic, mysterious novel set in 1923.

James Hamilton-Paterson describes Three Miles Down (first published in 1998) as 'the account of a treasure hunt in 1995 which I joined as the expedition's chronicler. A group of Britons had chartered the Russian oceanographic ship, the Mstislav Keldysh, to look for the wrecks of two vessels sunk in the Atlantic in the Second World War... Both were alleged to be carrying cargoes of gold.' For the author the experience was to bring home all 'the emotions and practical technicalities of the search phase of marine salvage.' '[Hamilton-Paterson's] unfolding of the story and his deft sketching of some unusual personalities grips like the skinny hand of the Ancient Mariner.' Scotsman 'He proves to be a chronicler of the intrigue among a crew of strangers, a fount of lore about wrecks and deep-sea exploration, and a marvellous witness to the lightless wonders of profound depths.' Outside

First published in 2001, Loving Monsters begins with a British writer, now living in Italy, being propositioned to write the biography of a strange near-neighbour, a man named Jebb whose life has taken in 1920s London, wartime Egypt and modern Tuscany. 'I suppose the book is a reflection on the nature of biography', James Hamilton-Paterson has written, 'but it is also about how love can appear to make a life monstrous while explaining and even redeeming it.' 'Thoughtful, provocative and extremely well written.' Sunday Times 'Fresh with the imaginative vigour and moral urgency that make Hamilton-Paterson an important writer.' Spectator 'New readers will stumble across [Hamilton-Paterson] in a bookshop and go on turning the pages with the same sense of joyful bewilderment: 'How does he do that? How can something be this good?'' Bella Bathurst, Sunday Herald

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.