Too Proud to Fight

David Reynolds

  • Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the ‘Lusitania’ by Diana Preston
    Doubleday, 543 pp, £18.99, May 2002, ISBN 0 385 60173 5
  • Lusitania: Saga and Myth by David Ramsay
    Chatham, 319 pp, £20.00, September 2001, ISBN 1 86176 170 8
  • Woodrow Wilson by John Thompson
    Longman, 288 pp, £15.99, August 2002, ISBN 0 582 24737 3

The Old Head of Kinsale juts out into the Atlantic from the southern coast of Ireland. For centuries sea captains have used it as a landmark. On 7 May 1915 a local family named Henderson, picnicking on the promontory in bright sunshine, were admiring a huge passenger liner with four raked-back funnels steaming eastward close to shore. Suddenly a vast plume of water and smoke towered above her decks. Within minutes the liner listed to starboard and her bow started to sink. As the stern rose in the water, four great propellers could be clearly discerned. Then she was gone. George Henderson was only six at the time. ‘I can still sit here now,’ he told a TV crew in 1994, ‘and see that great liner just sliding below the waves.’

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[*] Manchester, 272 pp., £49.50, 8 July 2000, 0 7190 5478 8.

[†] On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays by A.S. Byatt (Vintage, 208 pp., £7.99, 1 November 2001, 0 099 28383 2).