Description
By Chris Harvey, Harbound, 280 Pages, ISBN: 9780946609482, 1st Edition, 1991
- Second hand copy in excellent condition.
For nigh on a century, Britain produced the best cars in the world. Jaguar was just a jungle cat when Rolls-Royce first laid claim to the title. Then the son of an Irish musician, William Lyons, began to make lovely cars that moved so well they easily adopted a feline image. It was easy to visualise a D type sports racer, or the glamorous E type it spawned, as his greatest cars until you examined the reality: in post-war years, the best Jaguars have always been the saloons. Sometimes they have been better than any other car in the world, Rolls-Royce included.
In this book, Chris Harvey, one of Britain's leading automotive authors and photographer with Classic Cars magazine, examines the Jaguar's greatest saloons from the Mark V11, which was in a class of its own when it first appeared in 1950, through the Marks V111 and 1X, and into the smaller, more nimble Mark 1 of 1955 and the saloon that became an absolute classic, the Mark 11 of 1959. Variants, such as the Daimler V8, are not forgotten, as the line continued through the flagship Mark X, 420G and Daimler limousine to the S types, 420 and Daimler Sovereign.
These were the cars that helped create the most popular car Jaguar has ever made, the XJ6 line that developed into the incredibly quick XJ12 and the XJ-S that continues, with the new XJ6, into the 1990s. It is worth noting that Harvey practices
what he preaches, having driven many of these Jaguar saloons as every day cars.
As ever, in a book by Harvey, there are hundreds of glorious pictures, few of which have been seen before, many of them taken specially for the book by his wife, Mary
Harvey.
All of Chris Harvey's other books in this Classic Car series are no longer in print. See the back flap for details.
