On 2 June 1915, a London coronial inquest was held into the deaths on the night of 31 May of Henry Thomas Good, 49, and Caroline Good, 46. The jury returned the verdict That the deceased died from suffocation and burns, having been murdered by some agent of a hostile force.1 That was about as […]
A recent post on io9 mentioned Le Péril Bleu, a 1912 French novel by Maurice Renard (who also wrote the oft-filmed Les Mains d’Orlac, ‘The hands of Orlac’). According to io9, Le Péril Bleu features ‘invisible aliens who lived in the upper strata of the atmosphere[,] fish for humans and keep them in a space
All the cool kids are talking about How to be a Retronaut — well, they were a month or two ago, I confess it’s hard to keep up. How to be a Retronaut is a blog which tries to engage your sense of anachronism to try and shake your assumptions about the past. As the
Ashley Ekins, ed. 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History. Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010. This is the product of a conference held at the Australian War Memorial in 2008, and features contributions from people like Jay Winter, Robin Prior, Gary Sheffield, Trevor Wilson and Stephen
The aforementioned Mike Dash sent me the above photograph, presumably a fake, wondering if I’d seen it before and if I knew its provenance. I have not, but I agree it’s a fake. It can be found in a few places on the web, for example here and here. It purportedly shows two Italian airships
No sooner does Bomber Command get approval for its own grand memorial — to be precise, a £3.5 million neoclassical pavilion in London’s Green Park commemorating its 55,000 dead — than Fighter Command trumps it with a proposal for an even grander memorial: a ‘Battle of Britain Beacon’ at the RAF Museum at Hendon, which
Given that it climaxes on board an airship which is carrying a devastating new chemical weapon, Sapper’s fourth Bulldog Drummond novel The Final Count (1926) is somewhat disappointing from an airminded point of view. The poison gas is not intended for use against a city, or to terrorise an enemy, but to cover up a
The Earl of Avon. The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators. London: Cassell, 1962. The most famous British politician to ever wear an Anthony Eden. Also Foreign Secretary 1935-8 and later did other stuff. Roy Jenkins. Mr Balfour’s Poodle: People v. Peers. London: Papermac, 1999 [1954]. The People’s Budget and the 1910 General Elections. An interesting
In England and the Aeroplane, David Edgerton made the following striking, and oft-cited, point about Britain’s aerial strength at the outbreak of the First World War: Overall, England had fewer aircraft than the other great powers. The total of 113 compares with 120 for France, 232 for Germany, 226 for Russia and 36 for Austro-Hungary.
I was pleasantly surprised when A Fortean in the Archives linked (also here) to my recent post on Boer War airpower for several reasons. Firstly, because it’s always nice to be linked to. Secondly, because I’ve been following A Fortean in the Archives for a while now: the Fortean in question is Mike Dash, a
