Kirjahaku

One of the most famous of British cars, the diminutive but robust 750 cc Austin Seven, introduced in 1922, changed the course of automobile design and proved the viability of the small-capacity four-cylinder car. The salvation of the Austin company, it was aimed at families who might otherwise have travelled by motorcycle and sidecar, and it remained in production until 1939. The Seven performed as well on the race track as it did on the road and inspired a team of magnificent twin overhead camshaft single-seaters. It survives in respectable numbers to provide new generations of enthusiasts with a practical, economical car to run, race and restore.

Austin, Hillman, Morris, Standard and Wolseley were a handful of the myriad marques that once constituted Britain's indigenous motor industry. Born in 1896 into the high summer of Victorian prosperity, the native British industry survived until the collapse of The Rover Group in 2005. Jonathan Wood chronicles its 109-year life, from its production of hand-made bespoke automobiles for the fortunate few to the arrival of mass production to provide cars for the many. He looks at the factories and the people who worked in them, and examines the role played by the component manufacturers that serviced the industry. Wood offers explanations as to why motor manufacturing followed the British motorcycle, bicycle and cotton industries into oblivion.

This is a biography about the British motor industry's most influential and controversial engineer, Sir Alec Issignois. Wood exposes a behind-the-scenes impression of the personal and corporate struggles within the declining British car industry, a complex process in which Issigonis played a famous role. THE COLLAPSE in 2005 of MG Rover marked the end of Britain's indigenous motor industry as a volume car manufacturer. Yet back in the 1960s its Longbridge-based British Motor Corporation predecessor dominated the market with the iconic Mini and stylish 1100. Both were the work, together with the legendary Morris Minor, of Sir Alec Issigonis, CBE, FRS, the British motor industry's most influential and controversial engineer. In this full-length biography, published to commemorate the centenary of its subject's birth, which falls in 2006, award-winning motoring historian Jonathan Wood chronicles the rise and fall of Issigonis, born in Turkey of Greek/Bavarian parentage, who arrived in Britain as a near-penniless refugee and became the most powerful automobile engineer in the land.His ingenious and effective designs had a deep, lasting influence on the evolution of the motor car and on the wider history of industrial design, and he deserves to be ranked with the other giants of the field like Ferdinand Porsche in Germany and Dante Giacosa in Italy. Wood's candid and meticulously researched account, which exposes Sir Alec's public and private faces, and is the product of some 30 years of research, is complemented by interviews conducted with many of Issigonis' former colleagues and friends, including: Ronald Barker, John Cooper, Jack Daniels, Christopher Dowson, Paddy Hopkirk, Spen King, Dr Alex Moulton, Dr Bernd Pischetsrieder, Lord Snowdon and Stuart Turner. The finished volume is a balanced view of a remarkable, immensely talented man, with a behind-the-scenes impression of the personal and corporate struggles within the declining British car industry, a complex process in which Issigonis played a famous role.

Oxford police detective Arthur Wallace is no hero. He's a good cop, but prefers for action and heroics remain on the screen, safely performed by professionals. But then, secretive government agency MI37 comes calling, hoping to recruit Arthur in their struggle against horrors from another dimension known as the Progeny. Can an everyman stand against sanity-ripping cosmic horrors?

Another day. Another zombie T-Rex to put down. All part of the routine for Arthur Wallace and MI37-the government department devoted to battling threats magical, supernatural, extra-terrestrial, and generally odd. Except a zombie T-Rex is only the first of his problems...Before Arthur can say, "But didn't I save the world yesterday?" a new co-director at MI37 is threatening his job, middle-aged Russian cyborg wizards are threatening his life, and his co-workers are threatening his sanity.

When it rains it pours - monster machines. That attack during a funeral and ruin everyone's day. MI317 - the government department devoted to defending Britain from cosmic horrors - is under siege, so Arthur Wallace and his team must travel to Area 51, ably - and oddly - assisted by Agent Gran. But their travels don't end there, not when there's an Arctic town populated entirely by spore zombies and the 2.0 version of Clyde has some funny ideas about how to save the world.

Arthur Wallace and the MI37 team confront their complex personal relationships as well as robots originally created to aid the Nazi's invasion of Russia, leading to a trip for the team to the Himalayas, which takes them to a Nepalese death cult, then back to London for the final assault - amidst assorted relationship break-ups, hangovers and pregnancy scares.

Jonathan Wood remembers his oft-times weird and wonderful encounters in London in his trademark poetic style.Flowing, emanating out of the fabled glister of an imaginary literary prize, this self-isolating pilgrimage traces the author's footsteps back into the dimlit past, accompanied by the knocking of the oars of the Double-Styx Charon across the surface of the Thames and in the waters of my mind...He writes: "I didn't want to echo some of the great writers of the past in their impressions of London but I did want to sift through the dust and the after-thoughts of my experience, so that it became a spectrum of light and dark, perhaps the true constituents of a shadow, both in reality and in the mind and on the page. Somehow, I have come to this point now and shared with you as reader, impressions imprinted on my mind as if it were Letterpress. These 'Shadows' are figments of tenderest experience, sensitive to the touch and with no sense of 'going back'. They bring my past to the ordinary present, seen through my eyes and hopefully through yours. In after-years, perhaps this tome will resonate with you as the 'lived in' journey of the author putting his house in order and preparing for the next journey and its hidden destination."We listen at the slumbering walls of experience for recognisable echoes of our past; we catch the pain and the pleasure, the laughter and the tears, the knockings on the wall and the deafening silence... (adapted from the Author's Note)

I am here and I have hours to wait before I may take possession of this holiday flat for a simple fortnight's pleasure. The journey behind me collapses into the hinterland of my mind, rolled up as the past takes possession, penning it into its cavity and alcove. The capital seems a long way off. I think of the oval frosted glass and the sound of my neighbour's radio and the silence of the dawn and the work that has to be done in the unfolding unpredictability of the setting. I need to think carefully and to compose myself and imagine that the holidays are here and that everything is alright. But everything is not alright.