You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you can often pick up a few interesting things about it. Here we have number 77 in the Crime-Book Society series, Black Out by Captain A. O. Pollard. Fifty-four thousand copies have been sold (or at least printed), which makes it a fairly successful title. It’s […]
Joe Maiolo. Cry Havoc: The Arms Race and the Second World War, 1931-1941. London: John Murray, 2010. This was an automatic buy when I saw it on the new releases shelf. An arms race dynamic driving the great powers to war is a more familiar description of the period before the First World War than
Follow the events of 1940 day by day and week by week, seventy years later: Airminded – 7 October 1940 Battle of Britain Day by Day – 31 October 1940 Days of Glory – 31 October 1940 Duxford Operations Blog – 31 October 1940 Nick Cooper’s Random Blog – 31 October/1 November 1940 Orwell Diaries
Recently, Martin Waligorski contacted me to see if I’d like to collaborate with him in his post-blogging project, Battle of Britain – 70 Years. I had been thinking about doing some sort of post-blogging this year to mark the 70th anniversary of 1940, but probably not until later in the year, and for the Blitz
I’m giving a talk at the 2010 antiTHESIS interdisciplinary symposium, to be held on 9 July at the University of Melbourne’s Graduate Centre. The theme of the symposium is ‘futures’, which immediately grabbed me — as did last year’s, ‘fear’, but I didn’t get my act together in time for that — so I thought
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] The new Military History Carnival has been posted at Wig-Wags. One of the featured posts, The state of strategy at Kings of War — which looks at the great strategic thinkers of history and wonders why there seem to have been relatively few in recent times — inspired the above title. It’s
Your browser does not support iframes. In lieu of a more substantial post, here are some flying aeroplanes. Clicking the above picture will take you to a British Pathé newsreel issued on 7 July 1938, showing ‘Britain’s latest air fighter’, also known as the Supermarine Spitfire Mk I. Unfortunately the narration is missing, but I
On 2 June 1915, a London coronial inquest was held into the deaths on the night of 31 May of Henry Thomas Good, 49, and Caroline Good, 46. The jury returned the verdict That the deceased died from suffocation and burns, having been murdered by some agent of a hostile force.1 That was about as
A recent post on io9 mentioned Le Péril Bleu, a 1912 French novel by Maurice Renard (who also wrote the oft-filmed Les Mains d’Orlac, ‘The hands of Orlac’). According to io9, Le Péril Bleu features ‘invisible aliens who lived in the upper strata of the atmosphere[,] fish for humans and keep them in a space
All the cool kids are talking about How to be a Retronaut — well, they were a month or two ago, I confess it’s hard to keep up. How to be a Retronaut is a blog which tries to engage your sense of anachronism to try and shake your assumptions about the past. As the
