The Titanic (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) Book

The Titanic disaster has been the inspiration for a huge amount of writing, not to mention a film or two, and this volume is an unusually intelligent culling of writing and images from the event and the eight decades following its sinking. It is a superb anthology, a model of how this sort of thing ought to be done; 100s of fascinating and revealing documents and pictures. Some of the writing is familiar, but much of it has been collected here for the first time. Titanic, as a subject, is particularly well chosen, because it is able to give both tight focus (on the ship) and wide range (over the whole century).The earlier selections are from pre- publicity for the ship ("Accommodation of Unrivalled Magnificence" as was boasted) and from the ship itself, letters from passengers and so on. The central sections retell the story of the iceberg and the sinking and its extracts still have power to set the little hairs standing on your skin: from the understated wireless messages Foster prints ("CQD [Come Quick Danger] Have struck an iceberg. We are badly damaged. Titanic") to personal reminiscence and the proceedings of subsequent official enquiries. Finally we are given a wide range of later reactions to the tragedy, from Hardy's superb poem "The Convergence of the Twain" through to contemporary writers like Geoffrey Hill and Julian Barnes. It all goes to show how hugely this enormous ship, and its enormous iceberg partner, have loomed over 20th-century culture. Adam RobertsRead More