Robert Radcliffe returns with the second part of his Airborne Trilogy, Freefall. Theo Trickey’s war takes his to North Africa and some of C Company, The Parachute Regiment’s fiercest battles. In Germany, Daniel Garland is experiencing the reality of total war on the civilian population and piecing more of Trickey’s life back together and his connections to the late Erwin Rommel. As Arnhem looms, the battle to get there will be just as brutal as what is to come.
Read MoreThe Blackbird series of aircraft, by the legendary Lockheed designer Kelly Johnson, is the subject of James Hamilton-Paterson's latest non-fiction venture into aviation. Hamilton-Paterson tells a tale of Cold War paranoia and desperation that lead to an incredible aircraft that lived out beyond Mach 3 on the meter. Blackbird is a worthy tribute to her designer, those brave Habu and the incredible craft they rode.
Read MoreWhen a plane falls from the sky, it is a violent reassertion of gravity, of which, there is little escape. We hope that it is quick and the people on board know very little, but we rarely know much about the lives of those on board. When it is a small aircraft, those on board come under much closer scrutiny as, if it is an executive jet, they tend to be rather well off. This is the premise of Noah Hawley's latest novel, Before The Fall.
Read MoreSuperheroes are funny old things. I remember when reading a comic would get you ridiculed in the playground and possibly duffed up a bit. Especially if it was one of those American comics, you usually could get away with 2000AD because, well, Dredd. But these days, thanks to the movies and the rise to power of The Geek, comics are cool and Superheroes are big bank. The films and books we get these days try, to a greater or lesser extent, to ground their characters in a sense of reality. Gone are radioactive spider bites or gamma rays, in are gene splicing and good old evolution.
Read MoreCocktails are a wonderful, delightful and subjective thing. The latest addition to the the ever increasing library of Cocktail tales is Emma "Gin Monkey" Stokes' scientific look at drinking. The science may be beyond me, but the book and its take on the cocktail reference genre is an impressive, even if she does spoils some Castia-specific secrets.
Read MoreWhen is a film about a murder, not a film about a murder? Well, when it is The Face of an Angel. Michael Winterbottom's new film tries to look at a murder from the viewpoint of someone looking at the people who are creating the viewpoint we consume. Lost yet? It is an ambitious attempt to try and get past the hyperbole and look at the impact of a murder. And the murder they have chosen is one of the most well documented murders of our times, that of Meredith Kercher.
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