On 15 April 2012, 100 years will have passed since the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic hit an iceberg and foundered in the North Atlantic with the loss of 1,503 lives. Had the disaster not occurred, what is now the best-known ship in the world would have lost the title of the largest liner within just two years. She was certainly not the fastest passenger ship of the time and can be considered a technological throwback, yet Titanic captures the imagination like no other. This b...

On the 100th anniversary of Titanic's sinking, National Geographic revisits the romance, glory, and tragedy of this tremendous ship and presents an insider's look at the new findings about the passengers and scientific study of the wreck site. For 100 years the great ship Titanic has rested in its final grave on the ocean floor, lost to deep ocean darkness until its 1985 discovery by National Geographic's Bob Ballard. Relive the spell-binding tragic final hours of the ship in a detailed re...

Although he survived the sinking by seven months, it was the Titanic that killed Colonel Archibald Gracie. His struggles in the icy waters of the North Atlantic had shattered his constitution, and the awful things he had seen on that fateful night left him a haunted man. One observer said he had the look of someone “who had descended as distinctly into hell as any human being would care to acknowledge, and had risen again from the dead.” Nevertheless he tried to make sense of his experienc...

Titanic is not simply a sad romance—husbands left behind while wives wept in the lifeboats. Titanic is also a story of children who went down with the ship, of wives who rowed, and of survivors who lived to testify in court—of who lived, who died, and why. It is the story of benefit concerts; of clothing, combs, and hairpins for those who had lost everything; of the crewmember pursued by the lawyers of wealthy survivors; of people the survivors called “crazed Italians” and “savage foreigne...

The Titanic is one of the most famous maritime disasters of all time, but did the Titanic really sink on the morning of 15 April 1912? Titanic's older sister, the nearly identical Olympic, was involved in a serious accident in September 1911 – an accident that may have made her a liability to her owners the White Star Line. Since 1912 rumours of a conspiracy to switch the two sisters in an elaborate insurance scam has always loomed behind the tragic story of the Titanic. C...

Why is so much heroism attached to the sinking of the Titanic? Why do we accord impossible glory to the miserable, misbegotten drowining of the equivalent of a small town? What process led to the creation of champions? Who were the real heroes, and how were they overlooked? What did society - and the press - do with an overriding need for blame? By identifying the fable-making, and finally throwing off a blanket of boasting, this book enables a fresh, sharp focus ...

When the Titanic started sinking, who would make it off alive? The two cousins who had been so eager to see their first iceberg? The maid who desperately tried to escape with the baby in her care? The young newlyweds who'd booked passage despite warnings not to?More than one hundred years after that disastrous and emblematic voyage, Elizabeth Kaye reveals the extraordinary, little-known story behind one of the first lifeboats to leave the doomed ship. A Second Edition of the This N...

Lawrence Beesley was one of the luckiest men on the Titanic. Although the word had been given, “women and children first,” he was nevertheless ordered into a lifeboat to make up the numbers. At the end of that fateful night he stepped, dry and physically unharmed, onto the deck of the rescuing ship Carpathia. We are also fortunate in that, as a science teacher, Beesley was an intensely curious man. During the journey he had been paying careful attention to every aspect of shipboard life, f...

"Roland provides a well-balanced overview ... extensively illustrated and with timely coverage of some of the latest theories and research."-Stephen P. Ryder, Editor, Casebook: Jack the RipperMore than a century after he stalked the streets of London's East End, Jack the Ripper continues to exert a macabre fascination on the popular imagination.After scrupulously re-examining official documents of the time, investigative journalist ...

'Goodbye Miss Young. Good luck to you and don't forget to remember me to the folks back home.'Major Archibald Butt (1865-1912)The sinking of the Titanic on her maiden voyage in 1912 is one of the most dramatic stories in maritime history. The largest passenger steamship in the world, fitted with more advanced safety features than any of her rivals, she was proclaimed to be virtually unsinkable.More than 1,500 people perished when th...

THE WORLD'S GREATEST TEST PILOT TELLS HIS STORY'When you read through his life story, it makes James Bond seem like a bit of a slacker'Kirsty Young, Desert Island Discs'The greatest test pilot who ever lived. A true inspiration'Tim Peake, astronaut and former regular British Army Air Corps officer'The stories beggar belief'Guardian'Fascinating...

First published in 1912. "A Detailed and Accurate Account of the Most Awful Marine Disaster in History, Constructed from the Real Facts as Obtained from Those on Board Who Survived… INCLUDING Records of Previous Great Disasters of the Sea, Descriptions of the Developments of Safety and Life-saving Appliances, a Plain Statement of the Causes of Such Catastrophes and How to Avoid Them, the Marvelous Development of Shipbuilding, etc." According to Wikipedia: "Logan Mars...