The author is one of the founding curators of The National Air and Space Museum (part of the Smithsonian). He has written a magisterial long essay, subtitled ‘Inventing the aerial age from antiquity to the First World War’, which I very much enjoyed reading. The Great War is covered in seventy pages, together with sixteen of the eighty nine pages of references, which for four years out of the two thousand three hundred odd covered, seems very reasonable. There is no attempt to provide a detailed, blow by blow, history, but a well written, researched and documented progression from the depths of myth in the years before Christ, to the heights of reality achieved by 1918. The author and his researchers, have a great fondness for statistics: for example, I read that the RFC’s lowest combat loss rate was one airman killed or missing per 295 flight hours. At its worst in early 1917, it was one for every 92. Combat loss rates averaged one aeroplane per 100 sorties; in the Gulf War, it was one per 2700 sorties. Again, between 1917 and the end of the war, 52 raids by German bombers dropped 73 tons of bombs, killing or injuring nearly 3000 people, and inflicting nearly £1,450,000 of damage (about $125 million in modern money). I like this sort of thing.

There are many splendid pictures, some of which are rather badly reproduced, and I thought that the pages on the Great War were well argued and that the right conclusions were drawn. I am surprised that the modern argument, that da Vinci put deliberate mistakes into his drawings because he foresaw the dreadful things that flying machines would be used for, is not given an airing, but this book is excellent value.