Author Description

11 April 1912: "The White Star Liner Titanic, which left Southampton for New York yesterday on her first Atlantic voyage, surpasses in size and luxury, but especially in luxury, anything else afloat, if not also the Waldorf-Astoria and the Royal Automobile Club." Despite the far worse catastrophes that have followed, the Titanic disaster has lost none of its power to haunt our minds. As Philip French put it, "It is part of the legend, the narrative of our century." This collection brings together a century of coverage in the Guardian and the Observer: a mosaic of astonishing stories of courage and cowardice, of duties done and neglected, of bizarre and surreal incidents, of the interweaving of chance and fate.