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Monday Books: Those slaughtering, stinking engines of iniquity

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 20020408
Author:James Harkin

Auto Mobile: how the car changed life By Ruth Brandon (Macmillan, pounds 20.00)

"VILLAGES SKIPPED, towns and cities jumped - always somebody else's horizon!" boasted Mr Toad in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, toot-tooting his way through the countryside in a new motor- car. Reading Ruth Brandon's history of the automobile, it becomes easier to see how Grahame's character was shaped by malicious social satire. In the first years of the 20th century the car was a luxury good, the plaything of an emergent leisure class. During a Commons debate, one MP protested that "Harmless men, ...

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