Wings: The RAF at War, 1912-2012 - Tapa dura

For better or worse, we have needed wings and skilled, swift airmen and women to wear them. Mr Bishop leads us brilliantly through these violent skies. * Country Life * Magisterial sweep and range are combined with succinct and lucid analysis, all in prose as crisp as fresh lettuce. * Daily Express * Highly recommended * Military History Monthly * In this superb, pacy, often moving portrait of brave young men and women maintaining their sang-froid against hopeless odds, Patrick Bishop has done full justice to this subject, and confirmed himself as one of our finest popular military historians. * Mail on Sunday * A soaring, blazing sortie through a century of RAF aerial warfare told with the precision of a Spitfire turning into the attack, and etched with prose as clear as contrails in azure blue skies. * Jonathan Glancey *

The Royal Air Force is synonymous with its heroic achievements in the summer of 1940, when Winston Churchill's 'famous few' - the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots of RAF Fighter Command - held Goeering's Luftwaffe at bay in the Battle of Britain, thereby changing the course of the war. For much of the twentieth century, warplanes were fixed in the world's imagination, a symbol of the perils and excitements of the modern era. But within the space of a hundred years, military aviation has morphed from the exotic to the mundane. An activity which was charged with danger - the domain of the daring - is now carried out by computers and pilotless drones. Aviators have always seemed different to soldiers and sailors - more adventurous, questing and imaginative. Their stories gripped the public and in both wars and air aces dominated each side's propaganda, capturing hearts and dreams. Writing with the verve, passion and the sheer narrative aplomb familiar to many thousands of readers from his bestselling Second World War aerial histories, Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys, Patrick Bishop's Wings is a rich and compelling account of military flying from its heroic early days to the present.