Duff Cooper. The Duff Cooper Diaries, 1915-1951. London: Phoenix, 2006. Nobleman, socialite, Conservative MP, Cabinet Minister, anti-appeaser, and apparently a fine diarist too. Edited by his son, John Julius Norwich. Adam Tooze. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Allen Lane, 2006. I’ve heard good things about this book. […]
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Two deadlines expire shortly. If you were intending to meet them, your time is fast running out! One is for nominations for the 2006 Cliopatria Awards, for the best bits of the historioblogosphere this past year. Nominations close on 30 November. Collectively, my R&D associates have done well. Revise and
This is odd: To my readers, then, let me explain again that a pursuit plane should not carry out any pursuing. It should be a machine designed for fighting. It should have the qualities of fast climb, reasonable manœuvrability and gun-power. It should be simple in design and cheap to produce, because it will take
Arthur Harris. Bomber Offensive. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military Classics, 2005 [1947]. It’s that man again! And his memoirs. William Mitchell. Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power — Economic and Military. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1988 [1925]. Mitchell was not hugely influential in Britain, other than for bombing the Ostfriesland and, to
I’ve written about connections between sport and war before. Here’s another which I came across just last night, so perfectly timed that I can’t resist posting it. It’s from a book written in October 1941 or so by the pseudonymous Auspex, who is talking here about the RAF’s sweeps over France that summer, which he
Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 bomber over Spain, c. 1936, with Fiat CR.32 fighter escorts. Image source: Wikipedia. Exactly seventy years ago, in late November and early December 1936, Madrid was being bombed. The way Antony Beevor describes it, it was the first attempt at something like a knock-out blow: The nationialists’ failure to break through on
R. J. B. Bosworth. Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship, 1915-1945. London: Penguin, 2006. I have plenty of books on generic fascism, German fascism, British fascism … so one on the original fascism doesn’t seem excessive! Paul Kennedy. The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government. London: Allen Lane, 2006.
This sticker is in the back of a book published in 1940, originally part of the collection of the Public Lending Library of Victoria (itself a part of the Public Library of Victoria, as the SLV was then known). I was struck particularly by no. 4. Were books considered possible vectors for infectious disease —
DO YOU KNOW — Whether you can be gassed by bombs dropped from airplanes? The real strength of Germany’s Air Force? What sort of an air force Mussolini has? Why bombers cannot win the present war? What the Suicide Club of the war will be in history? Why there will be few romantic Aces in
I’ve been reading Respectful Insolence for quite a while now, but I somehow missed Orac’s post critiquing Richard Dawkins’ comments on Arthur Harris and the bombing of civilians in the Second World War, and how the development of precision-guided munitions (“smart bombs”) reflects a change in the moral zeitgeist since then. Fortunately, Jonathan Dresner pointed
