Nick Smart. Neville Chamberlain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010. I’m not a big reader of biographies, partly because they often aren’t ‘historical’ enough and partly because they usually aren’t about the people I’m interested in. This one satisfies on both counts.
‘In the Next War’ was a short series of books published in Britain in 1938 and 1939, edited by Basil Liddell Hart. Unlike the earlier To-day and To-morrow books which attempted to predict things to come, these were much less eclectic and much more narrowly focused on future warfare: airpower; seapower; tanks, infantry and the
Compare and contrast. The Daily Mail in 2007: During the dark days of the Second World War, British children passed the time with marbles, hopscotch, tiddlywinks and, for a lucky few, a Monopoly set. But over in Germany, the amusements were far less innocent. In one version of bagatelle named Bombers over England, children as
The final stop on my trip was London, where I stayed for most of a week (thanks, Jakob and Sarah, for putting me up!) I had big plans, but ended up spending most of my time at British Library Newspapers doing research for an article. But first I got to spend a weekend looking at
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Welcome to the restored Military History Carnival, a round-up of the best military history blogging of the last month. Since history is just one damn thing after another, let’s try this as a chronology. 327-5 BCE: Alexander the Great’s army fights yeti in India. 122 CE: Construction of Hadrian’s wall begins in
I’ve just had another article accepted, this time by the Journal of Contemporary History: ‘The air panic of 1935: British press opinion between disarmament and rearmament’ (the panic in question being over the creation of the Luftwaffe). It should appear in early 2011. And it was a difficult article, actually. I originally carved it out
I hadn’t come across this before. @ukwarcabinet recently linked to some informal notes of a War Cabinet meeting held on 8 February 1940. It was pretty quiet, even for the Bore War, and ‘Some of the subjects discussed were rather discussed by way of filling in time’. Including this: At the end of the Meeting
Some Britons I’ve spoken to claim to be unaware that their country has a National Space Centre. Well, it does and it’s in Leicester. I know this because Chris Williams took me there.
Last August I took up Twitter. I’ve just reached a thousand tweets (or will have, when this post is auto-tweeted), so it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on how useful the whole thing is. I was initially sceptical, but I find that Twitter does complement blogging very well. It’s a good place to
It must be time for some plots. The data here is taken from Richard Overy, The Air War 1939-1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]), 120, and represents the bomb tonnage delivered between 1940 and 1945 by Germany on Britain (including V-weapons) in blue, and by Britain and the United States on Europe as a whole
