Anthony McReavy

The biography of Frank Hornby also becomes a biography of his first invention - Meccano. Which is a shame, because I don't think of Meccano when I think of the name Hornby. In my childhood Hornby meant trains, and there's very little about that line of the business in this book. I suppose I can see why - the inventive idea was Meccano, the trains were more taking business advantage of a situation after WW1 when the traditional source of toy trains (Germany) was suddenly absent.
This became a little repetitive, with the same phrase types being repeated multiple times in the different chapters. I also found the occasional illustrations a little distracting. They'd appear in the middle of a sentence or were stuck on the side of the page, but seemed to have little or no bearing on the text.
So I now know more about Frank Hornby than I did, but I'm not sure it's a fine example of the biographer's art and I can't imagine I'll return to it again.… (meer)