Monthly Archives: August 2006

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Hamish Blair. 1957. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1930. Something a bit different -- an air control novel, instead of a knock-out blow one; India ablaze instead of London. As the dust-jacket ominously says, '1857: Indian Mutiny. 1957: ?' Luckily 1947 came first.

John Ramsden. Don't Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890. London: Little, Brown, 2006. It was all downhill after Three Men on the Bummel ... I love the title, and it looks like an insightful book on an important topic; but what's with having the endnotes not in the book itself but on a website? Do they think websites are permanent? Will the 10 pages omitted from the book really improve its profitability by that much? It's better than none at all, I suppose, but it does potentially diminish the book's useability for research purposes, now and in the future. For shame, Little, Brown, for shame.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Fw 198

Fw 198. Image source: Current Aviation, 26 November 1943, via Model Airplane Kits.

In the course of my research, I get to read many predictions about the future, partiularly the future of warfare. One of the reasons I like doing this is that it helps to restore the uncertainty of what used to be the future, but is now the past. I know (more or less!) the events which lay in the future of the writers whose dusty old books I read. They did not. This is completely obvious, of course, but it can be hard to remember this, and to put myself into the mindset of someone who lacked my knowledge of what was going to happen next. In reading their predictions of future events, I can get back some sense of their open future, which my past has closed off to me.

An example of this is the Battle of Britain: the many representations of the aerial combat between the Luftwaffe and the RAF in the last 66 years have fixed the combatants in our memory. From movies, documentaries, books, games, and even alcoholic beverages, we all1 know of the defending fighters, the valiant Spitfire and trusty Hurricane; and their opponents, the dangerous Me 109 fighter and the not-so-dangerous Me 110. We know that the Spitfire and Me 109 were the best fighters on their respective sides, and indeed were pretty evenly matched; that the Me 110 was outclassed by the Spitfire and Hurricane; that in turn the lesser British fighters (the Defiant, the Blenheim and the Gladiator) were soon placed out of harm's way; and so on.

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  1. For small values of 'all', admittedly ... [↩]