David S. Bird. Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012. An Australian equivalent of Richard Griffiths' Fellow Travellers of the Right, though this covers the Second World War period as well. The title isn't an affectation: it seems that the Aboriginal idea of the dreamtime was appropriated by pro-Nazis here as part of an attempt to forge a distinctively Australian fascism.

Jeremy Black. Avoiding Armageddon: From the Great War to the Fall of France, 1918-1940. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Black must be one of the most productive historians in history; this is the sixth book of his I've bought and that's less than 5% of the number of works listed on his LibraryThing page. Some of it doubtless recycled and I'm sure he has an army of research assistants, but still! This one is closer to my interests than most of his other books. It's a synoptic look at the anticipation of war in the 1920s and 1930s: how governments and militaries (primarily) digested the lessons of the First World War as well as the minor conflicts which came along in the interim. Black makes an effort not to be Anglo- or even Eurocentric: there's a chapter on war in the Far East and a couple each on imperial wars and third world wars. There's also a chapter on airpower, which looks like a decent overview, if necessarily brief given the scope. I must, however, query how he came to cite Neville Parton's The Evolution and Impact of Royal Air Force Doctrine 1919-1939 as a 2011 publication, when it hasn't been published even now; in fact the publisher is currently saying September 2013.

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