John Gooch. Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A big book for a big subject. There's a lot here on strategic debates and policy within the Fascist regime; not just how the military served Italian foreign policy ends in Spain and Abyssinia but also the intellectual responses to the changes in warfare since 1918. So Douhet gets some attention, but Balbo even more so. It's hardly a well-trodden area, at least in English, so I expect to learn a lot from this book.

Craig Stockings, ed. Zombie Myths of Australian Military History. Sydney: New South, 2010. Having enjoyed the sequel, I looked around for a copy of this but it was hard to find. So I grabbed it when I quite randomly found it in one of my regular haunts. This is more focused on the myths Australians like to believe about specific battles and campaigns, a number of which have been discussed here before: Breaker Morant (Craig Wilcox), Gallipoli (Rhys Crawley), HMAS Sydney (Oeter Dennis). Other debunkings include 'Australians broke the Hindenburg Line' (Elizabeth Greenhalgh) and '"There is an idea that the Australian is a born soldier..."' (Stockings). Good stuff.

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