The pity of war

Recent Articles

• Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis

  28 August 2008 in 1930s, Blogging, Periodicals, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis

  This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series.
  Tomorrow I’m starting a bit of an experiment, an idea I had after doing a post on Human Smoke a few months back. We’re coming up on the 70th anniversary of the Sudeten [...]

• Screening the knock-out blow

  26 August 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Film

  Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that
  I stand [...]

• Acquisitions

  22 August 2008 in Acquisitions, Books

  Jeffry Record. The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006. Generally speaking, I’m bored by the ritual invocation of Munich every time some foreign crisis dominates the headlines. But it’s not going to stop happening just because it bores me and it’s kinda my area (or adjacent to [...]

• Getting away from it all

  21 August 2008 in After 1950, Blogging, Civil defence, Cold War, Links, Nuclear, biological, chemical

  It seems like forever since the last one, but it’s only been two months. The (16th) Military History Carnival has been posted at the Osprey Blog. A few present-day items seem to have snuck in, but there’s still plenty of history in there. My selection this time is about Burlington, at Underground, a rather beautiful [...]

• Unwritten books

  19 August 2008 in Books

  [Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]
  I’m often surprised by the books that historians haven’t written. The years I am researching are between two and three generations distant, yet it’s not hard to find (what seem to me to be) big, important topics which deserve to have academic monographs devoted to them, but have somehow been neglected. [...]