[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] It’s 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever […]
One of the benefits of living in London for two months is the way it helped me to understand its geography. So when I read, for example, that 500 men, women and children walked from Greenwich to Trafalgar Square on 22 July 1917 to demand ‘improved air defences for London and the adoption of a
I’ve been reading the Daily Mail quite a lot since I’ve been here, but only issues published in 1940 or earlier. So I’m grateful to Jakob for pointing me in the direction of an article in today’s edition about German boardgames from the Second World War. It’s fascinating, but why is it news? Ostensibly because
A couple of weeks ago, I showed how the blitzkrieg became the Blitz. Now I’ll show how the knock-out blow became the blitzkrieg. Despite the abandon with which the term blitzkrieg is thrown around these days to describe the “lightning” German campaigns of the early years of the Second World War, it turns out that
The other day I came across a fascinating article by H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore. Mencken was very interested in colloquial English, and to this end penned “War words in England”, published in the February 1944 American Speech, about new words coming into use in the British press as a result of the
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The German bombing of London and other British cities between September 1940 and May 1941 is referred to as “the Blitz”, a contemporary term which, if not actually coined by the press, was certainly popularised by it. Blitz is short for blitzkrieg, German for “lightning war”, which was the label
Last year I talked about J. M. Spaight’s The Sky’s the Limit (here, here and here), and how its account of the then-developing Battle of Britain was somewhat surprising to anyone familiar with the standard narrative of the summer of 1940. Which is not at all to say that the standard narrative is wrong, just
During the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, British newspapers regularly published official German statements about the progress of the air war. Those relating to the war over Britain could be checked against both British communiques and, to an extent, personal experience. There were large discrepancies: for example, for 7 September 1940, the Luftwaffe claimed
The title relates to both the content of a paper I gave yesterday at the School’s Work In Progress Day, and to my own state of mind beforehand! I think it went well, though — at least there was no rotten fruit thrown at the end! — which is good because it was the first
This post is about a revelation I had a while back, which those of you with a firmer grasp of the English language than I will think is nothing at all new (and you’re right!) The thing is that I’d always been puzzled by the word barrage. This gets used a lot by journalists: ‘the
