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
Ashley Ekins, ed. 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History. Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010. This is the product of a conference held at the Australian War Memorial in 2008, and features contributions from people like Jay Winter, Robin Prior, Gary Sheffield, Trevor Wilson and Stephen
The aforementioned Mike Dash sent me the above photograph, presumably a fake, wondering if I’d seen it before and if I knew its provenance. I have not, but I agree it’s a fake. It can be found in a few places on the web, for example here and here. It purportedly shows two Italian airships
No sooner does Bomber Command get approval for its own grand memorial — to be precise, a £3.5 million neoclassical pavilion in London’s Green Park commemorating its 55,000 dead — than Fighter Command trumps it with a proposal for an even grander memorial: a ‘Battle of Britain Beacon’ at the RAF Museum at Hendon, which
Given that it climaxes on board an airship which is carrying a devastating new chemical weapon, Sapper’s fourth Bulldog Drummond novel The Final Count (1926) is somewhat disappointing from an airminded point of view. The poison gas is not intended for use against a city, or to terrorise an enemy, but to cover up a
