James Hamilton-Paterson

Cooking with Fernet Branca is a comic bad dream of modern Italy. Gerald Samper lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. An effete and snobbish Englishman working as a ghostwriter for celebrities, he would prefer to be remembered as a gourmet. His recipes include 'Mussels in Chocolate', 'Garlic and Fernet Branca Ice Cream', and a dish containing pureed prunes, rhubarb, and smoked cat (off the bone). Reluctantly, Gerald shares his hillside with Marta. As far as he can see, she is a vulgar woman from a crime-ridden former Soviet republic. She is also a composer in the neo-folk style who is writing a score for a glamorous Italian film director - though Gerald can't believe it. The mutual misunderstandings of these two exiles, each in search of a crowning success in the sunlight of Tuscany, get ever more dangerous. To the music of black helicopters and bad opera, and oiled by large quantities of the bitter aperitif Fernet Branca - all that either of them ever seems to have around the house - the lives of these two unlikely neighbours gradually and disastrously intertwine.

Cooking with Fernet Branca

Cooking With Fernet Branca

Nearing the end of his career, Sir Edward Elgar, the British composer, impulsively decides to travel to Brazil, where he encounters a woman from his past

Gerontius

Gerald Samper, an effete Englishman and ghostwriter for celebrities, lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. His idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, a vulgar woman from the Soviet Republic. The neighbours' lives disastrously intertwine as the English obsession with Tuscany is satirized.

The fascinating story of the spy plane SR-71 Blackbird—the fastest manned aircraft in the history of aviation. The SR-71 Blackbird, the famed “spy” jet, was deliberately designed to be the world's fastest and highest-flying aircraft—and its success has never been approached since. It was conceived in the late 1950s by Lockheed Martin's highly secret 'Skunk Works' team under one of the most (possibly the most) brilliant aero designers of all time, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson. Once fully developed in 1964, the Blackbird represented the apogee of jet-powered flight. It could fly at well over three times the speed of sound above 85,000 feet and had an unrefueled range of 3,200 nautical miles. It flew with great success until 1999). Despite extensive use over Vietnam and later battlefields, not one was ever shot down (unlike the U2 in the Gary Powers incident). The Blackbird's capabilities seem unlikely ever to be exceeded. It was retired because its function can be performed by satellites—and in today's steady trend toward unmanned military aircraft, it is improbable that another jet aircraft of this speed and caliber will ever again be conceived.

Blackbird

Presents a collection of essays that cover various aspects of the ocean, including sailing charts, islands, shipwrecks, and burial at sea.

The Sea and Its Thresholds

Seven Tenths

A History of the Untouchable Spy Plane

The hero of this black farce of a book is Gerald Samper, a ghostwriter to unbearable sports celebrities and rock stars, whose dream is to write the libretto of an opera. After an unsuccessful sojourn in Suffolk that ends in the accidental death of an ancient aristocrat, Gerry returns to Tuscany to the site of his collapsed house, now a place of pilgrimage after the strange apparition of a deceased English princess with great legs. A sinister estate agent smells a chance to make serious money, and Gerry is persuaded to go along with the scam in return for certain favours. Meanwhile, Gerry is motivated to collaborate on an opera about the life of Princess Diana, the not-quite-saint who has inspired such strange devotion. The premiere will be the high point of his life, though not quite in the way he imagines.

Rancid Pansies

A wonderful inner journey in the outer light and color of a remote coast, uncommonly well written.--Peter Matthiessen

Passion and Solitude on a Philippine Island

Playing with Water

James Hamilton-Paterson turns his literary and analytical skills to the wider picture of Britain's lost industrial and technological civilisation.

What We Have Lost

An illustrated celebration of the golden age of aircraft, cars and locomotives from 1900 to 1945.

Trains, Planes, Ships and Automobiles: the Golden Age 1919-1939

In 1945 Britain was the world's leading designer and builder of aircraft - a world-class achievement that was not mere rhetoric. And what aircraft they were. The sleek Comet, the first jet airliner. The awesome delta-winged Vulcan, an intercontinental bomber that could be thrown about the sky like a fighter. The Hawker Hunter, the most beautiful fighter-jet ever built and the Lightning, which could zoom ten miles above the clouds in a couple of minutes and whose pilots rated flying it as better than sex. Just what was it like to be alive in that marvellous post-war moment when innovative new British aircraft made their debut, and pilots were the rock stars of the age?James Hamilton-Paterson captures that season of glory in a compelling book that fuses his own memories of being a schoolboy plane spotter with a ruefully realistic history of British decline - its loss of self confidence and power. It is the story of great and charismatic machines and the men who flew them: heroes such as Bill Waterton, Neville Duke, John Derry and Bill Beaumont who took inconceivable risks, so that we could fly without a second thought.

When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World

Empire of the Clouds

“A very funny sendup of Italian-cooking-holiday-romance novels” (Publishers Weekly). Gerald Samper, an effete English snob, has his own private hilltop in Tuscany where he whiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions––including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter, herb-based liqueur known as Fernet Branca. But Gerald’s idyll is about to be shattered by the arrival of Marta, on the run from a crime-riddled former Soviet republic, as a series of misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity . . . “Provokes the sort of indecorous involuntary laughter that has more in common with sneezing than chuckling. Imagine a British John Waters crossed with David Sedaris.” —The New York Times

In 1986 the overthrow of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos by Cory Aquino's 'People Power' revolution focused global attention on the Philippines. Western media took their lead from the US, and the untrammelled denigration of the fleeing dictator and his wife served to tarnish the Philippines more generally. James Hamilton-Paterson, who knew the Philippines well having lived there for some years, resolved in America's Boy (1998) to examine the Marcoses more closely - not to exonerate them but, rather, to explain the political and social roots of their regime, sustained for so long by support from Washington. 'The ultimate book about the national character of the Philippines ... both a history and a psychoanalysis of a whole people, a socio-political tour de force.' Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, Malaya 'Every page displays Hamilton-Paterson's mastery of his material ... required reading for anyone interested in the enduring impact of US policy in the Philippines.' Publishers Weekly

America's Boy

A dramatic and fascinating account of aerial combat during World War I, revealing the terrible risks taken by the men who fought and died in the world's first war in the air. Little more than ten years after the first powered flight, aircraft were pressed into service in World War I. Nearly forgotten in the war's massive overall death toll, some 50,000 aircrew would die in the combatant nations' fledgling air forces. The romance of aviation had a remarkable grip on the public imagination, propaganda focusing on gallant air 'aces' who become national heroes. The reality was horribly different. Marked for Death debunks popular myth to explore the brutal truths of wartime aviation: of flimsy planes and unprotected pilots; of burning nineteen-year-olds falling screaming to their deaths; of pilots blinded by the entrails of their observers. James Hamilton-Paterson also reveals how four years of war produced profound changes both in the aircraft themselves and in military attitudes and strategy. By 1918 it was widely accepted that domination of the air above the battlefield was crucial to military success, a realization that would change the nature of warfare forever.

Marked for Death: The First War in the Air

A narrative history of the U.S.-supported dictatorship that came to define the Philippines. Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos presented themselves as the reincarnation of a primal couple from Filipino mythology. Ferdinand reinvented himself as a matchless fighter against the Japanese, and Time magazine hailed him as a hero. He was the strongman, the dictator, welcomed at the White House by Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, and the C.I.A..-America's Boy. For twenty-one years he and Imelda dominated the Philippines. In the , a "democratic revolution" replaced them with Corazon Aquino, who, in turn, was followed by Fidel Ramos, Imelda's cousin. Nothing changed: the world applauded, the shadow play went on. James Hamilton-Paterson has gathered astonishing information from senators, cronies, rivals, and Marcos family members, including Imelda. Covering the entire one-hundred-year history of U. S. involvement in the Philippines, he offers a devastating vision of the price Filipinos paid for dictatorship. Perhaps no other couple is as emblematic of American Imperialism as the Marcoses; America's Boy is their story. Passionate, deeply researched, and haunting, it is "a riveting read" (The Guardian [London]) by one of the language's best stylists.

A Century of United States Colonialism in the Philippines

Gerald Samper is not a lucky man. Ghost writer of terrible celebrity memoirs and lethally bad cook, he now watches as his beloved house falls off a hill in Tuscany. But he and his guests have been saved from certain death by an apparition - in the form of a certain deceased English princess with great legs. Or, at least, that's how the money-spinning rumour has it... And so begins a farcical comedy of eccentric Diana pilgrims, dead dinner guests, bad opera and Gerry's speciality field-mouse vol-au-vents. Every bit as outrageous as Cooking with Fernet Branca, James Hamilton-Paterson's latest novel is not for anyone who takes royalty (or, indeed, anything else) too seriously.

Nearing the end of his career, Sir Edward Elgar impulsively decides to travel by ship to Brazil, where he encounters a woman from his past. Set in 1923 and based on true events, Gernontius is a modern classic, and takes the great composer out of his depths in this beautiful, episodic, mysterious novel set in 1923.

An account of aerial combat in World War I, revealing the terrible risks run by the men who fought and died in the world's first air war.

James Hamilton-Paterson

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