Who is Ernest K. Gann? Critics of style will get the answer in one: a committee consisting of the ghost of Herman Melville and a North American kinswoman of Mrs Malaprop. Melville has contributed the folksy archaisms ('aloft or alow') and the whimsy: 'an aircraft waiting for the approach of its driver—hanging its head in shame'. Mrs Malaprop's American cousin has devised a startling new meaning for connive (radio signals help pilots 'twist, connive, and slip successfully between the towering cumulus') and a quite surrealistically new meaning for empirical. (p. 23)

If [Ernest K. Gann's Flying Circus] has a thesis it seems to be that modern flying, described as 'flying by the numbers', is less fun than 'flying by the seat of one's pants' as practised by the early barnstormers and airmail pilots. Nothing is said of the latterday barnstormers who, at least in Europe, display their aerobatic...