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The Automobile is a fascinating collection of one-sentence
anecdotes—more than two thousand of them. You may have known that Henry
Ford apologised in 1927 for his anti-Semitic remarks, but did you know that he
sacked the head of Ford’s German subsidiary in 1936 because he was Jewish? Or
that in 1933 the British car maker William Morris—aka the great public
benefactor Lord Nuffield—gave Oswald Mosley £50 000 to set up the
British Union of Fascists? Not all the stories are quite so worthwhile—but
every page has a nugget. How about this for foresight? In 1899, Scientific
American predicted that the car will “eliminate a greater part of the
nervousness, distraction and strain of modern metropolitan life”. Published by
Fitzroy Dearbon, £35, ISBN 1579580211.