This book, which has only one very distant forerunner authored by David A. Hills with David Nowell, represents a very big step that is the quantification of these problems and represents the twenty-five years’ worth of work which have gone on at Oxford since the first book on the subject. Fatigue (popularly ‘metal fatigue’) is the primary failure mode of all machines, engines, transmissions and indeed almost all mechanical devices. The propagation of cracks is well understood and is treated in the subject Fracture Mechanics. By contrast, the nucleation of cracks is very...