2006

1910s

But that happened in France

An interesting quote from Robert Graves’ autobiography, Goodbye to All That (London: Penguin, 1960 [1929]), 120. He was in London on leave; the date is not specified but it was before Loos, so I’d guess it was late summer, 1915. The Zeppelin scare had just begun. Some friends of the family came in one night, […]

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds. Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945. London: Pimlico, 2006. Scholars of the calibre of Richard Overy and Tami Davis Biddle examine the Dresden raid from a variety of angles. Hew Strachan contributes a chapter on “Strategic bombing and the question of civilian casualties up to 1945”. Why isn’t

Links, Radio, Television

Me to BBC: you guys rock!

The BBC has put online a catalogue of recordings held of its radio and television broadcasts since about 1930! Not the recordings themselves, mind you, but details such as broadcast dates, participants, and programme summaries, in many cases. Nor is it a complete record of what was broadcast: if it wasn’t recorded (as many early

1940s, Periodicals

Score Zero

Regarding the Japanese Air Force, which many people, he said, were inclined to discount as a second-rate body equipped with obsolete aircraft and lacking skillful and daring pilots, Air Vice-Marshal Pulford said that he certainly does not underrate its capacity. When it was suggested to him that it might be compared with the Italian Air

Acquisitions, Books

Acquisitions

J. M. Kenworthy. Peace or War? New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. I ordered this back in January, before I realised that it’s just Will Civilisation Crash? (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), under a different title. And a different pagination. Oh well. David Zimmerman. Britain’s Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe. Stroud: Sutton, 2001.

Australia, Contemporary, Pictures

The SLV

I spent most of the last week at the State Library of Victoria. It’s a grand old pile, built in the 1850s when Melbourne was awash with gold money (apparently, it was one of the richest cities in the British Empire). For the last decade or so, it has been undergoing works of some kind

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