Overview

Titanic. The Marilyn Monroe of ocean liners. A sleek, sultry beauty, taken out way before her time. A kind of 21st century Flying Dutchman, with interiors by Cesar Ritz, still striving to achieve the waters of a port she can never reach. Fuelled by a subtle mixture of horror, fascination and sheer, fatal glamour, she surges heedlessly across the still, starlit calm of our collective subconscious, hell bent on achieving her chilling, near midnight rendezvous with her killer. Titanic is a brilliantly lit stage, carrying her cast of exotic, terminally endangered extras toward an abyss at once both unfathomable and inconceivable. Here's where any similarity with any other tome about the Titanic ends. For the first time ever, a succession of key characters and groups of individuals come to the fore. Centre stage, over seventeen chapters, we meet the men whose decisions, actions and omissions combined like some slow burning powder trail to trigger a final, cataclysmic conclusion; the foundering, in mid Atlantic, of the biggest moving object ever seen on the face of the planet. One by one, a series of individuals take a bow. Seemingly omnipotent owners and hugely experienced ship's officers. Engineers and designers. Would be rescuers and embattled wireless operators. We meet them as individuals, not supermen. Their histories, backgrounds and life experiences are assessed for the first time ever, putting their actions on the night that Titanic sank into a context, a light as stark as that of the distress rockets, arcing into the sky. AUTHOR: Anthony Nicholas has been writing about cruise ships, ocean liners and sea travel for some thirty years. His work has featured in newspapers such as The Times, The Independent, The Mirror and The Scotsman, as well as magazines such as Ships Monthly and World of Cruising.

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9781399086004

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Reviews

""Written with all the dramatic flair of a finely penned novel, Key Figures Aboard RMS Titanic: Superstars and Scapegoats is a massively impressive work of meticulous historical research.""-- ""Midwest Book Review""

Written with all the dramatic flair of a finely penned novel, Key Figures Aboard RMS Titanic: Superstars and Scapegoats is a massively impressive work of meticulous historical research. -- Midwest Book Review

Author Information

Anthony Nicholas has been writing about cruise ships, ocean liners and sea travel for some thirty years. His work has featured in newspapers such as The Times, The Independent, The Mirror and The Scotsman, as well as magazines such as Ships Monthly and World of Cruising. To date, he has made more than two hundred ocean cruises, river cruises, and transatlantic crossings. These have taken in destinations from Copenhagen to Curacao, and Tromso to Tahiti. Over the course of these, an almost inevitable fascination with the Titanic gradually surfaced. Over four decades, he tracked the saga of the great, lost leviathan, and those whose fates became enmeshed with her sad story. This book is the result of those decades of considered reflection, tempered with a desire to flesh out certain, long held perceptions with an even handed sense of perspective. The intention of the author was to create a kind of immersive engagement' experience for the reader; to make them consider this most sensational of stories in a way that they might not, perhaps, have done before. Anthony Nicholas is also a keen fan of medieval and more contemporary military history, as well as modern, popular mainstream music of the Sixties and Seventies. In time, his stated ambition is to compose a series of travel volumes from past trips. To date, these have spanned four full decades, and covered over half a million miles, encompassing an area from the Arctic to the Amazon. The travel bug remains a terminal condition to this day .

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