On a wing and a prayer

Only the short-lived excitement about the Moon missions has given our age a hint of the fervour that aviation inspired in the interwar years. The new access to a whole new element gave that generation a defining identity, a sense of being incontrovertibly different from every one that had gone before, ever. A wonderful delusion that was not lost on the Western imagination.

Robert Wohl charts in fascinating detail the manifold reverberations of flight, literary, political, artistic, intellectual. Much more than a plane-spotter’s feast, this is a thoughtful, wide-ranging, meticulous (as befits a history professor) analysis of arguably the most salient new fact of the time. A brilliant idea, stimulating, packed with incident. This is his second volume on the theme; the first, from the earliest wing-flappings to the end of the first world war, was reviewed here in 1994, and again Yale have done him proud with a beautifully designed and illustrated book that makes it clear they take the subject seriously.