Book Reviews: Self-confident engineer

Adrian Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel: Engineering Knight Errant . John Murray, paperback, 1993, £12.99 (first published 1991). ISBN 0-7195-5282-6. The extensive Brunel archive, held mostly by the Institution of Civil Engineers in London and the University of Bristol, has provided so rich a mine of material that biographers have felt little need to seek other sources. Adrian Vaughan has set out to redress this condition; he tells us that he was provoked by a passage in the ‘standard biography’ by L.T.C. Rolt ( Isambard Kingdom Brunel , Penguin Books), ‘No strikes or labour disputes marred the building of the Great Western’ (railway), which he knew to be untrue. His book has therefore a somewhat wider aim than that to which it may be compared, Thomas Telford's Temptation by Charles Hadfield (Cleobury Mortimer 1993), largely concerned with adjudication on Telford v Jessop.