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9780007107292

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'A genuine original--smartly written, eccentric, funny, engaging, with just the right combination of anorak and anarchy!The flying sequences are fabulous, the historic ghosts of Bomber command are strangely moving, and the whole book stays wonderfully airborne throughout. It reminds me of the early lunatic Redmond O'Hanlon, and a bit of Roger Deakin's weird, soul-searching, swim-across-England book Waterlog . Antony deserves to have a great success.' Richard Holmes

'Inspirational...one of the best books ever written about flying., PILOT, May 2011 'What Nick Hornby did for football, Antony Woodward has done for flying ... Wonderful., OBSERVER 'Hugely engaging ... refreshingly amateur and low-tech ... a true love affair, albeit with clouds and air., SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Hilarious ... chock-full of incident, heartache, historical detail and near-death-experience, in as entertaining a non-fiction narrative as I have read ... Woodward has a gift for storytelling and comic timing and his acute awareness of the absurdities of maleness make this an impossible book not to like. INDEPENDENT 'A must-read for all pilots, everywhere, ever. But would I get in a plane with this nutter? F***, no.' (Captain) ALEX JAMES, BLUR 'Nick Hornby meets Jeremy Clarkson in a cockpit. Acutely funny', MARIELLA FROSTRUP 'Woodward's a truly terrible aviator - but his enthusiasm makes even the most timid flier want to take to the skies.' FHM 'A genuine original-smartly written, eccentric, funny, engaging, with just the right combination of anorak and anarchy...The flying sequences are fabulous, the historic ghosts of Bomber command are strangely moving, and the whole book stays wonderfully airborne throughout. It reminds me of the early lunatic Redmond O,Hanlon, and a bit of Roger Deakin,s weird, soul-searching, swim-across-England book Waterlog ., RICHARD HOLMES 'Lunatic... written so engagingly as to ensnare even those who know nothing about flying.' TIM BINYON, EVENING STANDARD 'Propellerhead is one of the best aviation books of the lot, and it has almost universal appeal...Take it from me, anyone who has even an incipient trace of flying in their blood will want to read Propellerhead.' PHILIP WHITEMAN, GENERAL AVIATION 'This eccentric, charming and poignant book is full of gems...sublime.' COUNTRY LIFE

Nick Hornby has a lot to answer for. Ever since Fever Pitch legitimized the (often, but not exclusively) male obsession with sport, we've had first-person confessionals covering cricket, boxing, greyhound and horse racing, scuba diving and now aeroplanes. Picking up some of these tomes, the best you can hope for is amusing self-indulgence, at worst, it's like having that sinking feeling when the only spare seat is next to the pub bore. But this book stands out from the crowd with its hilarious depiction of male insecurity. Having watched his mate Richard (a bank manager, for heaven's sake) suddenly pull the women with his new-found skill with a microlite, a new Jonathan Livingstone Seagull-sheen giving him an air of mystery that girls seemed to find irresistible, Woodward becomes determined not to be left behind. Some people form pop bands to earn sex. Woodward takes to the skies. What follows is a masterpiece of comic timing and exhiliration as he attempts to fly the flimsiest of contraptions. The eccentrics he meets and the scrapes he gets into are genuinely exciting and adrenaline-fuelled - his near-hits are superbly, pacily described - while the hinterland of past fliers is movingly evoked, and this quirky, very English book is almost impossible not to enjoy. You don't even have to like flying - though it's probably best not to take it on the 747. (Kirkus UK)

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"Antony Woodward is the author of the bestselling ""Propellerhead"" and co-author of the 2007 Christmas book ""The Wrong Kind of Snow"". He has written columns for Country Life and Tatler, and before that won many awards as an advertising copywriter. For some reason all his books so far have had something to do with clouds."

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