Excellent understanding of speed and driving. ( )

Alan Clark

Alan Clark MP, Conservative minister and relatively impoverished heir to a cotton-spinning fortune, was also a dedicated motorist and author of a monthly column in "Classic Cars" magazine. As Robert Coucher, editor of the magazine says in the introduction to this book, his brief was to be controversial - and he was. His articles, of which this book is largely composed together with a few entries from his published diaries, elicited more reader response than almost all the rest of the magazine, not all of it complimentary, and one can see why. He despised rich collectors who had their cars re-chromed, re-painted and re-upholstered within an inch of their lives and then did nothing so detrimental as driving them. Nor was he a snob about the cost of cars, though he had and drove many of the most expensive that could be bought. He travelled with members of his family from the south of England to Zermatt in his 2CV and enjoyed leaving reps behind at the lights in what he called his "Q-car", a Volkswagen Beetle with a Porsche engine and brakes.
This is a wonderful evocation of a society, an attitude and a motoring era now sadly gone for ever. ( )