Graham Coster's collection of writing about flying spans the twentieth century, and contains poems and prose by pioneed aviators, war pilots, amateurs and writers from Julian Barnes to Nicholson Baker.
The collection combines fact and fiction, epoch-making flights and tragedies like the Munich air disaster in which most of the Manchester football team died. Coster juxtaposes Beryl Markham with Biggles and Antoine de Saint-Exupery with Howard Hughes. The anthology reaches from H G Wells's vision of a flight from London to Glasgow in a self-constructed flying machine, to Dr Strangelove's dystopian vision of nuclear apocalypse.
