Ian Fleming's outlook on life was unashamedly elitist. Towards the end of On Her Majesty Secret Service, James Bond sees a Maserati at a filling station and observes of the passengers 'It was too far away to see if they were good looking enough for the car, but the silhouette of the woman wasn't promising.' He is proved right, tragically, when they turn out to be Blofeld and the hideous Irma Bunt.
Andy Thompson's Cars of Eastern Europe (Haynes 2011) tells a fascinating story of how political doctrine, and the lack of a raft of small versatile component makers, sidetracked development for fifty years. East Germany's Wartburg and Trabant were lumbered with two stroke power plants long after sumpless engines had been abandoned elsewhere. The Czechs stuck with tail-heavy rear engined layouts, including the extraordinary air cooled V8 in the Tatra (a more powerful engine than the water cooled V8 in our contemporary Rover).
The poor Poles had to squeeze whole families into Fiat 126s, rear engined and agonisingly tiny. Twenty years ago I drove one of these across much of Poland and I remember well its slowness and the discomfort of the offset pedals. However there was something perversely fun about it. My daily drive today is its natural successor, the Fiat Panda (made in the same Polish factory.)
And yet the people who drove these cars are shown here to be glamorous and extremely good-looking. Much more promising than their cars, in fact.
Stylish attractive and gallant people rising above ugly settings - that's the romance of Eastern Europe.
