The man of the year in 1909 was Louis Blériot, in whom I have a personal interest, since I was a five-month foetus at the time of his cross-Channel flight. Notoriously, this exploit showed that Britain was wide open to aerial attack and I was one of numerous infants born in the Belle Epoque who were called on to spend up to four years of their adult lives trying to shoot aircraft out of Britain’s skies; and a damned difficult task it was.

Only a month before Blériot took off from the Pas de Calais, the Académie Française – as we learn from this excellent and superbly illustrated book – had put up a prize for the best poem on ‘the conquest of the air’, with a cruel proviso that no entry should exceed 300 verses (surely French vers, or lines). It seems the poems still lie in a musty box in the archives. Robert Wohl, who teaches European intellectual and cultural history at the University of Los Angeles, does not say whether he rummaged through that musty box, but he has turned up many a fascinating source for his book. His purpose is to remind us of the tangled emotions stirred by the passion for powered flight, the Nietzschean aspirations, the Icarian follies, the patriotic posturings, the sane and insane prophecies, the challenge to aesthetic sensibilities, the cult of godhood, the purifying love of death and other forgotten fancies.

If you were born to walk the ground,
Remain there; do not fool around.

These words of Belloc tend to surface in the mind whenever a jumbo jet enters a belt of turbulence. But in the early years of this century the rush by humanity to get off the ground, or to see other people get off the ground, had become an astonishing compulsion; nowhere more so than in France, the self-styled nursery of flight.