James May just likes talking about and getting stuck in with vehicles. When he’s not on our small screens presenting (in the past) ‘Top Gear’ or (currently) ‘The Grand Tour’, he’s tinkering about in workshops, creating videos of his adventures in making motorbikes out of Meccano, building model planes that can fly across the Channel, or his attempts to build a ‘Swiss Army Bike’. A man it seems obsessed with the machines that get us from A to B, his current focus has turned away from propelling them by burning fossils or charging batteries, and towards those “marvellous vehicles” that only require the application of human muscle.

‘Marvellous Vehicles’ also happens to be the title of his new kids’ book that’s just about to be published. So what vehicles are marvellous and why? “Human-powered vehicles have intrigued me for a long time,” says May, giving bicycles on dry land as examples, pedalos on water and, for flight, Paul MacCready’s Albatross. As he...