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The Channel - The Remarkable Men and Women Who Made It the Most Fascinating Waterway in the World (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R443
Discovery Miles 4 430
You Save: R97
(18%)
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The Channel - The Remarkable Men and Women Who Made It the Most Fascinating Waterway in the World (Hardcover)
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List price R540
Loot Price R443
Discovery Miles 4 430
You Save R97 (18%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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A bulwark against invasion, a conduit for exchange and a challenge
to be conquered, the English Channel has always been many things to
many people. Today it's the busiest shipping lane in the world and
hosts more than 30 million passenger crossings every year but this
sliver of choppy brine, just 21 miles wide at its narrowest point,
represents much more than a conductor of goods and people.
Criss-crossing the Channel - not to mention regularly throwing
himself into it for a bracing swim - Charlie Connelly collects its
stories and brings them vividly to life, from tailing Oscar Wilde's
shadow through the dark streets of Dieppe to unearthing Britain's
first beauty pageant at the end of Folkestone pier (it was won by a
bloke called Wally). We learn that Louis Bleriot was actually a
terrible pilot, the tragic fate of the first successful Channel
swimmer, and that if a man with a buttered head and pigs' bladders
attached to his trousers hadn't fought off an attack by dogfish we
might never have had a Channel Tunnel. Here is a cast of
extraordinary characters - geniuses, cheats, dreamers, charlatans,
visionaries, eccentrics and at least one pair of naked, cuddling
balloonists - whose stories are all united by the English Channel
to ensure the sea that makes us an island will never be the same
again.
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