Gareth Russell

It was one of the biggest news stories of the infant twentieth century. It was a narrative of heroism, selfsacrifice, cowardice and abject failure. In this original and meticulously-researched narrative history, Gareth Russell uses the sinking of the Titanic, the ship of dreams, as a prism through which to look at the end of the Edwardian era and the seismic shift to modernity the 1910s have come to mark in the West. In his study Russell, an historian and novelist from Belfast – the birthplace of the ill-fated RMS Titanic – examines social class, the movie industry, the American Gilded Age and the Irish Home Rule crisis through that Titanic window.