Acquisitions

Sarah Caro. How to Publish Your PhD. London: SAGE Publications, 2009. Might come in handy one day.

P. D. Smith. Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon. London: Penguin, 2008. Nice to see I’m not the only one with such dreams. NB: the author has a blog which often contains items of interest.

Kate Darian-Smith. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime: 1939-1945. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2009. 2nd edition. Actually, I bought this last week but I don’t suppose anybody cares but me! An excellent survey of life in wartime Melbourne — the phoney war period, the fear of invasion and bombing in early 1942, the arrival of the Americans, rationing, moral panics about resident aliens and promiscuous women. It could almost be contemporary London.

Richard Overy. The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars London: Allen Lane, 2009. One I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on! It’s not a general history of the 1920s and 1930s, but more a history of ideas, with a particular focus on (as the title suggests) pessimistic ones. There are a couple of chapters on pacifism which look especially interesting. And while it’s not profusely illustrated, the pictures are well-chosen: the one on the back cover of the Southwark Spain Shop (‘Buy a tin of food! We will send it to Spain’) is worth at least a thousand words.

Oliver Stewart. Air Power and the Expanding Community. London: George Newnes, 1944. Thanks to Chris for pointing this one out to me. Looks forward to the post-war period and argues that the airpower (both military and civil) will be fundamental to the power blocs which will emerge, and that armed forces should combine all three arms, of equal status under a unified war ministry.

Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko. The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Talks a bit about the Baruch plan, which seems (perhaps naively) to me to be a close relative of the pre-war proposals for an international air force and the international control of civil aviation.

David Faber. Munich: The 1938 Appeasement Crisis. London: Simon & Schuster, 2008. A much-needed narrative history, though I’m sure it won’t quite satisfy me! Mostly political and diplomatic, and mostly from the British point of view. Also some of the street-level stuff — calls ARP Sunday gas mask Sunday.

Matthew J. Flynn. First Strike: Preemptive War in Modern History. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. From 1805 to 2003. Only looks at actual instances of preemptive war, so no knock-out blow or nuclear strategy.

David Cortright. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. A history of pacifism, mainly concentrating on Britain and the United States in the 20th century, with an emphasis on the latter half.

S. P. MacKenzie. The Battle of Britain on Screen: ‘The Few’ in British Film and Television Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. A short but densely-packed book, a series of cases studies of key representations of the Battle: The Lion Has Wings, The First of the Few, Angels One Five, Reach for the Sky, Battle of Britain, Piece of Cake, A Perfect Hero. Of course, The Lion Has Wings was made before the Battle, and so is anticipation, not memory. Note: review copy (not for Airminded).