Ian Johnston

A treasury of photos illustrating the work of the famed British shipbuilders of World War I. Although best known for large liners and capital ships, between 1914 and 1920 the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown & Co. built a vast range of vessels-major warships down to destroyers and submarines, unusual designs like a seaplane carrier and submarine depot ship, and even a batch of war-standard merchant ships. This makes the yard a particularly good example...

HMS Ramillies was the last battleship to join the Grand Fleet in 1917 and survived to fight in the Second World War. Although the ship did not make headlines, she was actively employed from start to finish, and even survived being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. In this respect she was typical rather than extraordinary but, like any large ship, to her crew she was unique – she was certainly the only ship in British naval history whose captain...

""When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing--though...