h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wholeheartedly echo the Researcher who advises you to seek out these books in jumble-sales, old bookshops, et c.

This way you will avoid the horribly, horribly, insipid 1980's and 1990's rewrites that cut the guts out of these books in the name of political correctness.

Biggles not allowed to smoke? Come on... EVERYONE did during the world wars? That may not make it right - but it makes it more accurate!

And he was a product of the British Empire - so he isn't likely to have reconstructed ideas about other races and cultures, is he? Again, not right, but accurate and true to the character.

("Biggles Flies South" - presciently, in an Africa soon to become post-colonial, Biggles is tasked with countering insurgency which is spilling out of an un-named former Belgian or French colony and into a neighbouring British one, possibly Uganda. Apparently one tribe, now without a restraining colonial hand to prevent it, is seeking dominance by slaughtering and enslaving a neighbouring tribe. Shades of Rwanda... Biggles prevents this - for now - but voices a catalogue of gloomy predictions about post-Imperial Africa, all of which have been proven right.)