John Wilson Foster’s first book on Titanic was The Titanic Complex: A Cultural Manifest (1997). This was the first book to place the ship and its sinking into the broad British and American cultural context, both of 1912 and subsequent decades. 

Titanic had been a subject that tended to be avoided in Ireland for commercial and political reasons, and The Titanic Complex was among the first to see the ship and its culture as, in the beginning, Northern Irish.  Penguin Press then commissioned the author to compile an anthology covering the eight decades of Titanic’s career from its conception through its building, launch and sinking to its astonishing after-lives during the rest of the twentieth century. 

Titanic was published in the U.K. and North America in 1999. On Blackwell’s ‘Books of the Decade’ website, it is called ‘one of the most satisfying anthologies ever’.  John Wilson Foster’s third book on the ship was called The Age of Titanic  (2002) which the Irish Times in its review called ‘an instant classic’. It has been republished as Titanic: The Sceptre of Power as an Amazon Kindle ebook.