The Car

The rise and fall of the machine that made the modern world

Bryan Appleyard

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Paperback

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English

Weidenfeld & Nicolson
17 March 2022

History of engineering & technology

The car that we know - petrol or diesel-driven and operated by a human - will soon be replaced by electric cars which, in turn, will become self-driving. The reign of the car, which began in the late nineteenth century, will have lasted at most 150 years.

More than any other technology - more than television, mobile phones, more even than the internet - cars have transformed our culture. On the streets we notice people talking on their phones, but custom and habit have blinded us to the more astounding daily spectacle: the sound and smell of billions of tons of motorised metal, rubber and glass.

Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings.

Bryan Appleyard's brilliantly insightful book places the car where it belongs: as the central technology of our lives, cultures, politics and history. It is a narrative-led evocation of how this momentous invention has produced equally good and bad outcomes, both freed us and imprisoned us. It is intended to make us notice the car, to see its extravagance and its genius, in its dying years as the crucial machine of modernity.

By: Bryan Appleyard
Imprint: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 232mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 404g
ISBN: 9781474615402
ISBN 10: 1474615406
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 17 March 2022
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Bryan Appleyard was educated at Bolton School and King's College, Cambridge. He was Financial News Editor and Deputy Arts Editor at The Times until 1984. He has subsequently written for many publications including the Sunday Times, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Spectator and the New Statesman. He has been Feature Writer of the Year three times at the British Press Awards and Interviewer of the Year once. In the 2019 Birthday Honours list he was appointed Commander of the British Empire for services to the arts and journalism.

Reviews for The Car: The rise and fall of the machine that made the modern world

The car has totally changed our society. Bryan Appleyard is just the writer to get to the heart of this phenomenon. * Melvyn Bragg * As cars undergo their latest electro-smart evolution, Bryan Appleyard's extraordinary cultural history of them explains how they changed our everyday experience. This is a brilliantly written and thoughtful account of the machines which made our lives recognisably modern. * Michael Burleigh * An entertaining and superbly researched story about the industrial age's most astonishing and enchanting creation. * Gavin Green, Car Magazine * Very few people could do justice to this extraordinary story - and with this book Bryan Appleyard sets the bar impossibly high for anyone else. * Rory Sutherland * An exhilarating spin through the history of the machine that transformed our culture from its earliest incarnation to its imminent demise. * Saga Magazine * The prose is sharp, well organised and well researched. * Country Life * Bryan Appleyard is well known to readers as a thoughtful interpreter of our frets and anxieties... a thinking man's Clarkson. * Spectator * This engaging history of the motor car is full of rich anecdotes and detail. * Sunday Times * This fond look at the history, development and significance of the automobile is supercharged by wonderful writing... As sharply as he draws portraits of the key players, Appleyard, one of the liveliest minds in journalism, is at his most acute when musing on the cultural effects of the car. * Observer * Appleyard, an unashamed petrol-head, rightly celebrates the pleasures of driving and the freedoms that the automobile has brought us ... Perhaps the car as we have known it, like the horse in Ford's time, is done. If so, Appleyard has provided it with an immensely readable obituary. -- Nick Rennison * Daily Mail *