Books and literature

Three books published this month have birds on their frontispiece and whilst, for instance, the mute swan is shown with uncanny resemblance to Concorde, the most relevant is the drawing of a wandering albatross for it appears in “Flight and Nature”. It is hardly surprising it is published privately for the immense quantity of diagrams and formulae means that anyone prepared to read it from cover to cover must be interested in the subject to a degree somewhere beyond passionate. The enormous number of illustrations and graphs range from double‐folding wing of F. auricularia, an insect, to contra‐oscillation compensation where two propellers are used and nowhere, gratefully, is there any mention of da Vinci. It is above all a work of love and of profound dedication.