THE PERFECT MILE meet SWIMMING TO ANTARCTICA in this compelling tale of how nineteen-year-old Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel.

On the morning of August 6, 1926, Gertrude Ederle stood in her bathing suit on the beach at Cape Gris-Nez, France, and faced the churning waves of the English Channel. Twenty-one miles across the perilous waterway, the English coastline beckoned. Lyrical text, stunning illustrations and fascinating back matter put the reader right alongside Ederle in her bid to be the first woman to swim the Channel—and contextualizes her record-smashing victory as a defining moment in sports history. Time line, bibliography, source notes.

*Now a Major Film* On the night of 24 August 1875 Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old British Navy captain, launched himself into the English Channel at Dover. Twenty-one hours and 45 minutes later he became the first man to swim the English Channel. In this acclaimed biography, Kathy Watson shows how Captain Webb was instrumental in bringing the sport of swimming into the modern era. It is also a study of the Victorian drive to push back the boundaries of endurance. In THE CROSSING, Watson uses this great British eccentric's extraordinary life as a springboard to explore themes of obsession and failure and the emerging force of the media, and swimming's place in our psyche.

This book approaches the English Channel as a border which connected, as much as it separated, France and England in the eighteenth century.

To the early Romans it marked the end of the world. To the French it is simply La Manche, or the 'sleeve'. But to the British it is the English Channel, a powerful symbol and literal barrier, defining an island nation. Stirred by a news report of the replacement of Britain's last lighthouse keepers by computers, Sebastian Smith quit his press agency desk job in spring 1999 to explore the vanishing way of life of those who live on and by the Channel. Gripped by the stories he hears and the people he encounters, he is seduced by the lure of the sea and determines to make his own journey across the Channel, teaching himself to pilot and sail a tiny sea-going dinghy...

A history of the building of the Channel Tunnel, which connects England and France, with emphasis on the difficulties of digging a tunnel where some engineers said it could not be done.