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Edward Pellew, captain of the legendary Indefatigable, was quite simply the greatest frigate captain in the age of sail. An incomparable seaman, ferociously combative yet chivalrous, a master of the quarterdeck and an athlete of the tops, he was as quick to welcome a gallant foe into his cabin as to dive to the rescue of a man overboard. He is the likely model for the heroic but all-too-human Jack Aubrey in Patrick O'Brian's novels.Pellew was orphaned at eight, but fought his way from the very bottom of the Navy to fleet command and a viscountcy. Victories and eye-catching feats won him a public following. Yet as an outsider with a gift for antagonizing his better-born peers, he made powerful enemies. Redemption came with his last command, when he set off to do battle with the Barbary States and free thousands of European slaves. Contemporary opinion held this to be an impossible mission, and Pellew himself, in leading from the front in the style of his direct contemporary Nelson, did not expect to survive.Pellew's humanity as much as his gallantry, fondness for subordinates and blind love for his family, and the warmth and intimacy of his letters, make him a hugely engaging and sympathetic figure. In Stephen Taylor's magnificent new life he at last has the biography he deserves.

Jack McNulty is a 'temporary gentleman', an Irishman whose commission in the British army in the Second World War was never permanent. In 1957, sitting in his lodgings in Accra, he urgently sets out to write his story. He feels he cannot take one step further, or even hardly a breath, without looking back at all that has befallen him.He is an ordinary man, both petty and heroic, but he has seen extraordinary things. He has worked and wandered around the world - as a soldier, an engineer, a UN observer - trying to follow his childhood ambition to better himself. And he has had a strange and tumultuous marriage. Mai Kirwan was a great beauty of Sligo in the 1920s, a vivid mind, but an elusive and mysterious figure too. Jack married her, and shared his life with her, but in time she slipped from his grasp.A heart-breaking portrait of one man's life - of his demons and his lost love - The Temporary Gentleman is, ultimately, a novel about Jack's last bid for freedom, from the savage realities of the past and from himself.

The fashionables, they tell me their artistic opinion. They just want to know if a painting is hot. Whether it will gain. And then they criticise anyone who is different, anyone who's not on the 'direct route' to taste. Fuck 'em.Turner, the English romantic landscape artist and 'painter of light', was a man obsessed. Intensely prolific he was heavily reliant on his father, deeply affected by his mother's rejections and isolated from the usual breed of artists.English painting is dead. It's dealers making fortunes out of sentimental dross. Dogs. Cherubs.The Painter by Rebecca Lenkiewicz premiered at the Arcola Theatre, London, in January 2011 in the production which marked the opening of its new premises on Ashton Street.

Ever since the Second World War and the Holocaust, historians, psychologists and theologians alike have attempted to explain how a single personality could bring about some of the greatest horrors of the modern era. Ron Rosenbaum's Explaining Hitler investigates the meanings and motivations people have attached to Hitler and his disturbing policies - and whether or not he believed his own doctrines - and explores the continuing fascination with the nature of evil. The book also documents the story of the earliest critic of Hitler, the Munich Post in the 1920s and 1930s, and its violent demise.First published in 1998, and using interviews of leading experts such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock and Daniel Goldhagen, and discussing the work of many more, Exploring Hitler is a balanced overview of a dark subject.

Immortalized as the author of The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers led a life quite as enigmatic and adventurous as his classic novel.Childers was orphaned at an early age. Though he was brought up in County Wicklow, he received an English education that culminated in a clerkship to the House of Commons, voluntary service in the Boer War, and the writing of his great novel. Thus far he appeared patriotic, imperialist and largely conformist. But marriage to a strong-willed Bostonian and an increasing interest in the affairs of Ireland led to his questioning the imperial Zeitgeist. At first this took constitutional forms, but such was Childers' frustration with progress towards any manner of Irish independence from British rule, that on the eve of the First World War he instigated gun-running to supporters of the Home Rule movement.Nonetheless, he still regarded it as his duty to serve England, and during the war he distinguished himself as an observer in the early seaplanes and torpedo boats. Traumatized, however, by the Easter Rising of 1916, he finished the war profoundly divided in his loyalties. With the Irish question now critical, Childers settled his fate by becoming the official propagandist for the Republican movement. He opposed the treaty that established the Irish Free State, regarding the compromise as anathema, and joined the IRA. Hunted by the Free State authorities, he was eventually captured and executed in November 1922.Set against the backdrop of Britain's imperial zenith, the great naval arms race and the First World War, Jim Ring's acclaimed biography of Childers does full justice to this dramatic and intriguing story. 'Jim Ring has written a fine and fluent biography of an extraordinary man, navigating the angry waters [of Irish politics] with a sure hand but dodging none of the difficulties.' Independent on Sunday

For English read British which is not to quibble with the title but, as Jim Ring himself explains, 'During the period on which this book focuses, it was the custom - in the words of a Scot - ''to let the part - the larger part - speak for the whole.'' Those countries which received them - France, Italy, Austria, Germany, and above all Switzerland - all talked of the English, and the presence of the English in the Alps was precisely so described. To use the term British would thus have been an anachronism.'The nineteenth century will forever be associated with the growth of the British Empire, but nearer home there was a quieter conquest taking place. Gradually the English were taking over the Alps, scaling their peaks, driving railways through them, and introducing both winter sports and those quintessential English institutions - tea, baths, lawn tennis and churches - to remote mountain villages.Jim Ring tells the remarkable story of the English love affair with the Alps, from its beginnings with the Romantic movement, when poets such as Byron and Shelly wrote of the mountains with awed delight, through the great days of the 1850s and 1860s and the formation of the Alpine Club, to the inter-war years when the English assured the future prosperity of the alpine resorts by virtually inventing and then popularizing downhill-skiing.Part history, part biography, How the English made the Alps brings the characters - the artists, the scientists, the gentleman-adventurers, the invalids, the aristocrats, eccentrics and mountain-scramblers - vividly to life.'Jim Rings's book cannot be bettered.' Daily Mail'Fascinating' Stephen Venables, Daily Telegraph 'Evocative and entertaining' Financial Times'A comprehensive, well-written account of a fascinating subject' Guardian

When a storm sweeps through the country, Asa wakes up the next day to find that his town is almost unrecognisable - trees have fallen down, roofs have collapsed and debris lies everywhere. But amongst the debris in his back garden Asa makes an astounding discovery - the body of a small winged creature. A creature that looks very like a fairy. Do fairies really exist? Asa embarks on a mission to find out. A mission that leads him to the lost journals of local eccentric Benjamin Tooth who, two hundred years earlier, claimed to have discovered the existence of fairies. What Asa reads in those journals takes him on a secret trip to Windvale Moor, where he discovers much more than he'd hoped to . . .Charming and utterly unforgettable, The Windvale Sprites is Mackenzie Crook's debut children's novel, containing his own exquisite illustrations.

Thomas Bernhard, one of the most distinct, celebrated, and perverse of 20th century writers, took his own life in 1989. Perhaps the greatest Austrian writer of the 20th century, Bernhard's vision in novels like Cutting Timber was relentlessly bleak and comically nihilistic. His prose is torrential and his stlye unmistakable. Bernhard is the missing link between Kafka, Beckett, Michel Houellebecq and Lars von Trier; without Bernhard the literature of alienation and self-contempt would be bereft of its great practitioner. Cutting Timber: An Irritation is widely recognised as his masterpiece. Over the course of a few hours, following a performance of Ibsen's The Wild Duck, we are in the company of the Auersbergers, and our narrator, who never once leaves the relative comfort of his 'wing-backed chair' where he sips at a glass of champagne. As they anticpate the arrival of the star actor, and the commencement of dinner, the narrator of Cutting Timber dismantles the hollow pretentiousness at the heart of the Austrian bourgeoisie. The effect is devastating; the horror only redeemed by the humour.

Edward Thomas was perhaps the most beguiling and influential of First World War poets. Now All Roads Lead to France is an account of his final five years, centred on his extraordinary friendship with Robert Frost and Thomas's fatal decision to fight in the war.The book also evokes an astonishingly creative moment in English literature, when London was a battleground for new, ambitious kinds of writing. A generation that included W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and Rupert Brooke were 'making it new' - vehemently and pugnaciously. These larger-than-life characters surround a central figure, tormented by his work and his marriage. But as his friendship with Frost blossomed, Thomas wrote poem after poem, and his emotional affliction began to lift. In 1914 the two friends formed the ideas that would produce some of the most remarkable verse of the twentieth century. Their writing was far more than just war poetry, but it was World War I that put an ocean between them. Frost returned to the safety of New England while Thomas stayed to fight for the Old.It is these roads taken - and those not taken - that are at the heart of this remarkable book, which culminates in Thomas's tragic death on Easter Monday 1917.

In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, an old widow Fatma awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, first arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her faithful servant Recep, a dwarf and the doctor's illegitimate son. Under the creeping shadow of right-wing nationalism and political revolution, they share memories, and grievances, of the early years, before their home became a high-class resort.Her visiting grandchildren are Faruk, a dissipated failed historian; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgun, has yet to discover the real-life consequences of highminded politics; and Metin, a high school student drawn to the fast life of the nouveaux riches, who dreams of going to America. But it is Recep's nephew Hassan, a high-school dropout, lately fallen in with right-wing nationalism, who will draw this family into the revolution and the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey's tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity. By turns deeply moving, hilarious, and terrifying, Silent House pulses with the energy of a great writer's early work even as it offers beguiling evidence of the mature genius for which Orhan Pamuk, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2006, would later be world renowned.

When Emma Brockes was ten years old, her mother said 'One day I will tell you the story of my life and you will be amazed.' Growing up in a tranquil English village, Emma knew very little of her mother's life before her. She knew Paula had grown up in South Africa and had seven siblings. She had been told stories about deadly snakes and hailstones the size of golf balls. There was mention, once, of a trial. But most of the past was a mystery. When her mother dies of cancer, Emma - by then a successful journalist at the Guardian - is free to investigate the untold story. Her search begins in the Colindale library but then takes her to South Africa, to the extended family she has never met and their accounts of a childhood so different to her own.She encounters versions of the life her mother chose to leave behind - and realises what a gift her mother gave her.Part investigation, part travelogue, part elegy, She Left Me the Gun is a gripping, funny and clear-eyed account of a writer's search for her mother's story.

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, this is the biography of celebrated nineteenth-century artist Edward Burne-Jones, who - with William Morris - connects Victorian and modern art.'A triumph of biographical art.' Independent'Magnificent.' Guardian 'Rarely are biographies both as authoritative and engaging as this.' Literary ReviewThe angels on our Christmas cards, the stained glass in our churches, the great paintings in our galleries - Edward Burne-Jones's work is all around us. The most admired British artist of his generation, he was a leading figure with Oscar Wilde in the aesthetic movement of the 1880s, inventing what became an iconic 'Burne-Jones look'. Widely recognised as the bridge between Victorian and modern art, he influenced not just his immediate circle but European artists such as Klimt and Picasso.In this gripping book, award-winning biographer Fiona MacCarthy dramatically re-evaluates his art and life - his battle against vicious public hostility, the romantic susceptibility to female beauty that would inspire his work but ruin his marriage, his ill health and depressive sensibility, and the devastating rift with his great friend and collaborator, William Morris, when their views on art and politics diverged. Blending new research with a fresh historical perspective, The Last Pre-Raphaelite tells the extraordinary story of Burne-Jones: a radical artist, landmark of Victorian society - and peculiarly captivating man.

Wait now, light me up so we do this right, yes, hold me steady to the lamp, hold it, hold, good, a slow pull to start with, to draw the smoke low into the lungs, yes, oh my...Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid's opium room the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. Here, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In the broken city, there are too many to count. Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao's China, it portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.

The Dream of the Celt explores the life of the Irish revolutionary Sir Roger Casement who was executed for treason after his involvement in the 1916 Easter Rising, travelling with its protagonist from Liverpool and Dublin to the Congo and Peru, where Casement worked as a British consul, and to London, where he ended his life in Pentonville jail.With its preoccupation with political issues and its international scope The Dream of the Celt sits firmly in the tradition of the greatest of Vargas Llosa's work.

A private security contractor loses it in the Congo, with deadly consequences, while in Ireland the ex-prime minister struggles to write his memoir. A tabloid star is killed in a helicopter crash and three years later a young journalist is warned off the story. As a news story breaks in Paris, a US senator prepares his campaign to run for office.What links these things and who controls what we know?With echoes of John Le Carre, 24 and James Ellroy, Alan Glynn has written another crime novel of and for our times - a ferocious thriller that moves from Dublin to New York via West Africa, and thrillingly explores the legacy of corruption in big business, the West's fear of China, the fate of ex-military, the role of back room political players, and the quick fix of online news.

'A splendid tale of human ingenuity in the service of taste, sedulously researched and told with great flair.' Loyd Grossman Sunday TimesAuthor of such cookery classics as Italian Food and French Provincial Cooking, Elizabeth David (1913-1992) found that the literature of cookery, as well as the practical side, was of absorbing interest, and she studied it throughout her life. Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen was published in 1970, followed by English Bread and Yeast Cookery, for which she won the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year award, in 1977. At the time of her death in 1992 she was working on this equally epic study of the use of ice, the ice-trade and the early days of refrigeration, which was published posthumously in 1994 as Harvest of the Cold Months.'An awe-inspiring feat of detective scholarship, the literally marvellous story of how human beings came to ingest lumps of flavoured frozen matter for pleasure ... There is much, much more - about the making and breaking of reputations, the founding of Parisian caf, culture, the great and rivalrous confectioners of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, about Russian ice-cream (surprisingly superior) and Persian sherbets ... sumptuous.' Independent on Sunday'This survey of the use of ice in cookery takes us on a fascinating journey from 1581, where in Florence they put snow in the wine glasses, to that modern phenomenon, the growth of the ice-cream business. A scholarly social history, which makes a fitting finale to the work of the greatest of our writers on foods and its contexts.' Harpers & Queen

Viewed through the eyes of those on the ground, Black Watch reveals what it means to be part of the legendary Scottish regiment, what it means to be part of the war on terror and what it means to make the journey home again.This book contains Gregory Burke's award-winning text, with production notes by the director John Tiffany and colour photographs that capture the powerful and inventive use of movement in this visceral, complex and urgent piece of theatre.The National Theatre of Scotland's production of Black Watch opened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006 where it won a Herald Angel, a Scotsman Fringe First, a Best Theatre Writing Award from The List, a Stage Award for Best Ensemble, the Critics' Circle Award and the South Bank Show Award for Theatre. In 2007 it began a world tour in Scotland. "e;Completely brilliant."e; Daily Telegraph "e;Black Watch is a glorious piece of theatre, raw, truthful, uncomfortable, political, funny, moving, graceful and dynamic."e; Scotland on Sunday"e;A brilliantly realised piece."e; Evening Standard "e;A magnificent piece of social and political theatre. A high point not just of the festival but of the theatrical year"e; Observer

One Sunday morning in 1993 a 16-year-old girl named Eliza Claps goes missing from a church in the centre of Potenza, Italy. Shortly before her disappearance, Elisa had met Danilo Restivo, a strange local boy with a fetish for cutting women's hair on the back of buses. Elisa's family are convinced that Resitvo is responsible for their daughter's disappearance, but he is protected by local big-wigs: by his Sicilian father, by a doctor with links to organised crime, by a priest who had vices of his own. Years went by and Elisa's family could find only false leads.2002, and Restivo is now living in Bournemouth. In November that year, his neighbour is found murdered, with strands of her own hair in her hands. Once again the police are at a loss to pin anything on him. It's not until 2010, when Elisa's decomposed body is found in the church where she went missing, that the two cases are linked and Restivo is finally dealt with. Blood on the Altar combines a gripping true crime case with Jones's deep understanding of Italian culture - the impunity it offers to the powerful - he so expertly demonstrated in his bestseller: The Dark Heart of Italy.

'As they used to say in Ireland, the devil only comes into good things.'Narrated by Lilly Bere, On Canaan's Side opens as she mourns the loss of her grandson, Bill. The story then goes back to the moment she was forced to flee Sligo, at the end of the First World War, and follows her life through into the new world of America, a world filled with both hope and danger. At once epic and intimate, Lilly's narrative unfurls as she tries to make sense of the sorrows and troubles of her life and of the people whose lives she has touched. Spanning nearly seven decades, it is a novel of memory, war, family-ties and love, which once again displays Sebastian Barry's exquisite prose and gift for storytelling.

Eigengrau / [ay-gen-gr-ow ] - noun. intrinsic light; the colour seen by the eye in perfect darkness Rose believes in true love and leprechauns. Her flatmate Cassie is engaged in a fervent struggle against patriarchal oppression. Across London, Mark believes in the power of marketing. His flatmate Tim Muffin is engaged in a fervent struggle against his own waistline. In a city where Gumtree can feel like your closest friend, looking for the right person can lead you all the wrong places.Penelope Skinner's Eigengrau premiered at the Bush Theatre, London, in March 2010 in a Strawberry Vale production.

David Greig: Plays 1 brings together four key plays by the playwright described by the Daily Telegraph as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation'. In Outlying Island two young Cambridge ornithologists are sent to a remote island. Together with its authoritarian leaseholder and his niece they observe an innocence that is about to be destroyed forever. San Diego offers a strange and occasionally nightmarish journey into the heart of the contemporary American dream, weaving together stories of illegal immigrants, of film stars and whores, and even of the playwright himself. Pyrenees follows a man found lying in the snow in the foothills as he tries to piece together his identity. In The American Pilot a crash-landing in a remote valley in a distant country raises questions about how the world sees America and how America sees the world. The collection also includes a trilogy of short plays, Being Norwegian, Kyoto and Brewers Fayre, published here for the first time. Outlying Island 'I can't recommend it highly enough . . . A rich, charged play, veering between the comic and the poetic as innocence gives way to experience.' Telegraph San Diego 'A surreal and intriguing piece of theatre . . . dazzling . . . Home and awake from the mythical dream that is San Diego, the name David Greig remains imprinted on our minds.' Independent Pyrenees 'All the wit and intelligence of previous works, probing away at concerns that are both contemporary and timeless...A classy, rewarding, engaging drama, Greig's best to date.' The TimesThe American Pilot 'One of the most intellectually stimulating dramatists around. A richly provocative new play.' Guardian

Lunch in Soho with a former lover - but Zanzotti's is under new management, and as the wine takes effect fond memories give way to something closer to the bone. A mock-elegy for the heady joys of old-time Soho, The Song of Lunch displays the full range of Christopher Reid's wit, craft and human sympathy.

Unlike most how-to books on screenwriting, Writing in Pictures is highly practical, offering a realistic guide to the screenwriting profession, as well as concrete practical guidance in the steps professional writers take to write a screenplay that comes from the heart instead of the pocketbook. The readeris taken through the nitty-gritty process of conceiving, outlining, constructing, and writing a screenplay in the professional format, with clear and concise examples offered for every step in writing a short dramatic film.Writing in Pictures offers straight talk, no mumbo-jumbo or gimmicks, just a methodical, step-by-step process that walks the reader through the different stages of writing a screenplay -- from idea to outline to character biography to treatment to step outline to finished screenplay. Using well-known films and screenplays, both contemporary and classic, to illustrate its lessons, Writing in Pictures also offers comments from famous screenwriters past and present and insightful stories (often colorful and funny) that illuminate aspects of the craft.

From a motorway service area to her ambivalent relationship with religion, Wendy Cope covers a wide range of experience in her new collection. Her mordant humour and formal ingenuity are in evidence, even as she remembers the wounds of a damaging childhood; and in poems about love and the inevitable problems of aging she achieves an intriguing blend of sadness and joy. Two very different sets of commissioned poems round off a remarkable volume, whose opening poem sounds clearly the profound note of compassion which underlies the whole.

When the man in white appeared, blocking his path, Giacomo felt a brief surge of relief at the thought that he was no longer alone. Then he remembered where he was, and terror rose in his throat like vomit.Aurelio Zen returns to his native Venice to investigate the disappearance of a rich American resident but he soon learns that, amid the hazy light and shifting waters of the lagoon, nothing is what it seems. As he is drawn deeper into the ambiguous mysteries surrounding the discovery of a skeletal corpse on an ossuary island in the north lagoon, he is also forced to confront a series of disturbing revelations about his own life.If you enjoyed the Inspector Zen Mystery series you may also like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.

After his adventures under sun-drenched Neapolitan skies in Cosi Fan Tutti, Aurelio Zen finds himself back in Rome, sneezing in a damp wine cellar and being given another unorthodox assignment: to release the jailed scion of an important wine-growing family who is accused of a brutal murder. Zen travels north to an Italy as outwardly serene as Naples was manic. Amid the quiet fields, autumnal skies and crumbling farmhouses of Piedmont, Zen must try to penetrate a traditional culture in which family and soil are inextricably linked. Here secrets can last for generations, and have a finish as long and lingering as that of a good Barbaresco. Zen must also face up to mysteries from his own past, as well as grapple with the greed, envy, hatred and love that are the human components of any landscape.

At this point there is a welcome touch of comedy as the man's feet appear above the tail-gate of the garbage truck. Clad in highly polished brogues and red-and-black chequered socks below which a length of bare white leg is just visible, they proceed to execute a furious little dance, jerking this way and that like puppets at a Punch and Judy show - possibly a knowing allusion to the commedia dell'arte, which of course originated in this city.Inspector Zen has been posted to Naples in disgrace, where he is asked to oversee the clean-up of the city's corrupt authorities. Like the rest of Italy, Naples is concerned about its image and is trying to reform itself. Zen, however, finds that someone else is already at work. Corrupt politicians, shady businessmen and eminent members of the Italian Mafia are disappearing off the streets at an alarming rate and Zen must find out who is behind the murders.

There was something about the Burolo case which was different any other he had ever been involved in. He had known cases which obsessed him professionally, taking over his life until he was unable to sleep properly or to think about anything else, but this was even more disturbing.Inspector Zen has a problem: an impossible murder, recorded on the closed-circuit video of Oscar Burolo's top-security Sardinian fortress. As he gets to work, he is once again plunged into a menacing and violent world where his own life is soon at risk.If you enjoyed the Inspector Zen Mystery series you may also like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.

'As you may have gathered, there was a suicide in St Peter's this afternoon. Someone threw himself off the gallery inside the dome. Such incidents are quite common, and do not normally require the attention of this department. In the present instance, however, the victim was not some jilted maidservant or ruined shopkeeper, but Prince Ludovico Ruspanti.'When, one dark night in November, Prince Ludovico Ruspanti fell a hundred and fifty feet to his death in the chapel at St Peter's, Rome, there were a number of questions to be answered. Did he fall or was he pushed? Inspector Aurelio Zen finds that getting the answers isn't easy, as witness after witness is mysteriously silenced - by violent death. To crack the secrets of the Vatican, Zen must penetrate the most secret place of all: the Cabal.If you enjoyed the Inspector Zen Mystery series you may also like The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, another crime novel by Michael Dibdin.

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.