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The story of Frank Whittle - RAF pilot, mathematician of genius,
inventor of the jet engine and British hero. In 1929, a
twenty-two-year-old maverick named Frank Whittle - a self-taught
aeronautical obsessive and risk-takingly brilliant RAF pilot -
presented a blueprint for a revolutionary, jet-powered aircraft
engine to the Air Ministry. His idea had the potential to change
the course of history, but it was summarily rejected. In this
meticulously researched biography, Duncan Campbell-Smith charts
Whittle's stoic efforts to build his jet engine in the interwar
years, during which he was constantly frustrated to find his
ground-breaking project impeded by bureaucratic inertia until the
outbreak of war in 1939. Eventual recognition of the importance of
his work by the British government came too late for Whittle's
invention to play a major part in the Second World War, but after
the war his dream of civilian jet powered aircraft was gradually
realized - eventually transforming the entire world of air travel.
Gripping in its narrative, authoritative in its technical detail
and insightful in its judgements, Jet Man is the definitive telling
of the life of an engineering icon and unjustly neglected British
hero of the Second World War - and a tantalizing tale of 'what
might have been'. Reviews for Jet Man: 'A very well-written and
long overdue corrective account of an extraordinary man' James
Hamilton-Paterson 'Highly readable, and based on thorough research,
Jet Man casts new light on the intense, heroic character of Frank
Whittle and his revolutionary invention. The tale of how he
overcame all the obstacles in his path is a gripping one. What also
makes Duncan Campbell-Smith's narrative compelling is the way the
complex mechanics of jet propulsion are so clearly explained' Leo
McKinstry
The story of Frank Whittle - RAF pilot, mathematician of genius,
inventor of the jet engine and British hero. In 1985 Hans von
Ohain, the scientist who pioneered Nazi Germany's efforts to build
a jet plane, posed the question: 'Would World War II have occured
if the Luftwaffe knew it faced operational British jets instead of
Spitfires?' He immediately answered, 'I, for one, think not.' Frank
Whittle, working-class outsider and self-taught enthusiast, had
worked out the blueprint of a completely new type of engine in
1929, only for his ideas to be blocked by bureaucratic opposition
until the outbreak of war in 1939. The importance of his work was
recognized too late by the government for his revolutionary engine
to play a major part in World War II. After the war Whittle's dream
of civilian jet-powered aircraft became a reality and Britain
enjoyed a golden age of 1950's jet-powered flight. Drawing on
Whittle's extensive private papers, Campbell-Smith tells the story
of a stoic and overlooked British hero, a tantalizing tale of 'what
might have been'.
How can we account for the dynamic growth of East and Southeast
Asian countries? Much of the debate has turned on the question of
the 'state' versus the 'market' as exclusive (and often competing)
explanations of the successful performance of individual countries.
This book explores the distinctively interdependent nature of the
East and Southeast Asian experience. As firms create a regional
organization of production, the growing interdependence of national
labour markets is one major outcome.
For almost a hundred years from the 1860s, the City of London's
overseas banks financed the global trade that lay at the core of
the British Empire. Foremost among them from the beginning were two
start-up ventures: the Standard Bank of South Africa, which soon
developed a powerful domestic franchise at the Cape, and the
Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China. This book traces
their stories in the nineteenth century, their glory days before
1914 - and their remarkable survival in the face of global wars and
the collapse of world trade in the first half of the twentieth
century. The unravelling of the Empire after 1945 eventually forced
Britain's overseas banks to confront a different future. The
Standard and the Chartered, alarmed at the expansion of American
banking, determined in 1969 on a merger as a way of sustaining the
best of the City's overseas traditions. But from the start,
Standard Chartered had to grapple with the fading fortunes of its
own inherited franchise - badly dented in both Asia and Africa -
and with radical changes in the nature of banking. Its British
managers, steeped in the past, proved ill-suited to the challenge.
By the late 1980s, efforts to expand in Europe and the USA had
brought the merged Group to the brink of collapse. Yet it survived
- and then pulled off a dramatic recovery. Standard Chartered
realigned itself, just in time, with the phenomenal growth of
Asia's 'emerging markets', many of them in countries where the
Chartered had flourished a century earlier. In the process, the
Group was transformed. Trebling its workforce, it brushed aside the
global financial crisis of 2008 and by 2012 could look back on a
decade of astonishing growth. Recent times have added an eventful
postscript to a long and absorbing history. Crossing Continents
recounts Standard Chartered's story with a wealth of detail from
one of the richest archives available to any commercial bank. The
book also affords a rare and compelling perspective on the
evolution of international trade and finance, showing how Britain's
commercial influence has actually worked in practice around the
world over one hundred and fifty years.
Heavily featured in the media when it first appeared, Trevor
Hercules has now updated and added to a work that led to his
involvement advising Government ministers and MPs on youth and
black crime. Part biography, part critique of the system, part
innovative proposals, this book is essential reading at a time of
gun, knife and gang crime. Heavily influenced by the author's
thoughts on how a mindset is created in deprived communities in
which ambition, employment, opportunity and advancement are thought
impossible - something bound up with the advantages of the few (and
where black people are concerned the shadow of the UK's colonial
past) - he guides readers along the pathways he discovered "the
hard way" as a dangerous young offender. With a new Introduction,
Foreword by Duncan Campbell, extended chapters and a whole new part
on the Hercules Programme the book challenges entrenched ways of
thinking and examines the Social Deprivation Mindset (SDM) that
unless something is done to change it holds back countless young
people to the detriment of society as a whole.
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