James Paterson

Little more than ten years after the first powered flight, aircraft were pressed into service in World War I. The romance of aviation had a remarkable grip on the public imagination, propaganda focusing on gallant air 'aces' who become national heroes. The reality was horribly different. Some 50,000 aircrew died in World War I. Marked for Death explored the brutal truths of wartime aviation: of flimsy planes and unprotected pilots; of burning nineteen-year-olds...

Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany where he whiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions-including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur known as Fernet Branca. But Gerald's idyll is about to be shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former Soviet republic, as a series of misunderstandings...

The fascinating story of the spy plane SR-71 Blackbird-the fastest manned aircraft in the history of aviation. The SR-71 Blackbird, the famed "spy" jet, was deliberately designed to be the world's fastest and highest-flying aircraft-and its success has never been approached since. It was conceived in the late 1950s by Lockheed Martin's highly secret 'Skunk Works' team under one of the most (possibly the most) brilliant aero designers of all time,...

"In 1805, the world of music was startled by an avant-garde and explosive new work. Intellectually and emotionally, Beethoven's Third Symphony, the "Eroica," rudely broke the mold of the Viennese Classical symphony and revealed a powerful new expressiveness, both personal and societal. Even the whiff of actual political revolution was woven into the work-it was originally inscribed to Napoleon Bonaparte, a dangerous hero for a composer dependent on...