A. Bowdoin Van Riper. Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. In some ways this feels like similar territory to Joseph Corn's The Winged Gospel, but as the title suggests it has more of a popular culture focus (especially film). It also has much more of a worldwide and comparative scope, which together with its conciseness might make it a good introductory text on airmindedness.

David T. Courtwright. Sky as Frontier: Adventure, Aviation, and Empire. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Looking at the history of aviation as the expansion into a frontier is an interesting approach, especially in terms of the American experience, as examined here. But it's also a useful entry point to the key transition from the 'age of the pioneers' to the 'age of mass experience' (actually the main section of the book). As a bonus Courtwright also takes his argument up to the Space Age.

Apparently aviation has historically had some slight connection with the United States...

Dominick A. Pisano (ed.) The Airplane in American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. I've actually used this collection before, for Jill D. Snider's excellent chapter on the aerial bombardment of Tulsa in 1921, but there is much else here of value for me. In particular, Pisano's own chapter on 'The confrontation between utility and entertainment in aviation' highlights a key tension in aerial theatre.

Jenifer van Vleck. Empire of the Air: Aviation and the American Ascendancy. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2013. A history of the American century through the lens of the spectacular growth through to the 1960s of Pan Am under Juan Trippe. Starts out with a chapter intriguingly called 'The Americanization of the airplane', which by implication might explain why I've been able to get away without paying too much attention to American aviation culture: for my period it wasn't so dominant as it became from the 1940s.

Prudence Black. Smile, Particularly in Bad Weather: The Era of the Australian Airline Hostess. Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2017. I've been fortunate to hear some presentations relating to Pru's ARC project on the history of Australian air hostesses, and it's fascinating stuff. Drawing partly on oral history interviews, she charts the changing roles and gender expectations of air hostesses from the rough days of the 1930s, through to the glamorous jetset era, up to the increasing professionalisation by the early 1980s.

Sue Rosen (ed). Scorched Earth: Australia's Secret Plan for Total War under Japanese Invasion in World War II. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2017. Largely a reproduction of a fascinating document from the NSW State Archives outlining civil preparations for a Japanese invasion, with some editorial contextualisation and some evocative illustrations. It's a fascinating plan for last-ditch resistance and resource denial, but you have to wonder how much would have been carried out in reality. (Luckily, that was never likely to be tested.) Review copy (not for Airminded).

David Stephens and Alison Broinowski (eds). The Honest History Book. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2017. The book of the website! A collection of essays arguing for the proposition that 'Australia is more than Anzac -- and always has been', half on putting Anzac in its place, the other half on what Anzac has hidden.

Richard Toye (ed.) Winston Churchill: Politics, Strategy and Statecraft. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 'Not another Chuchill book!' I groaned on seeing this. But then I bought it, because it's got an essay by Richard Overy on 'Churchill and airpower' (plus a few other interesting things).

Owen Hatherley. The Ministry of Nostalgia. London and New York: Verso, 2017. Hatherley's misapprehension about the origins of Keep Calm and Carry On got me an article in The Conversation, so I figure I owe him a book sale. But I also suspect that he's on to something with his (much) larger argument about the memory of the Blitz (etc) as a form of austerity nostalgia.

Mathew Radcliffe. Kampong Australia: The RAAF at Butterworth. Sydney: NewSouth, 2017. Butterworth was a name I was familiar with growing up, but knew next to little about. For most of the Cold War, it was the RAAF's only permanent air base outside Australia, located in what is now northern Malaysia. The strategic purpose was to defend against communist and Indonesian threats, and RAAF Sabres, Mirages and other aircraft were stationed there from the 1950s through to the 1980s. But this book (based on a PhD) isn't really about that: it's much more a social history, about life in this far-off western enclave of military personnel and their families inside a foreign society at the end of an old empire and the start of a new nation. And I think it will be all the more interesting for it!

Nicholas Booth. Lucifer Rising: British Intelligence and the Occult in the Second World War. Stroud: History Press, 2016. The intersection of two potentially very dodgy topics, black magic and black propaganda; but I'm reassured by the author's statement that he doesn't believe in the occult (not sure where he stands on British intelligence...) and fairly extensive use of The National Archives. Everybody from Dennis Wheatley to Rudolf Hess is here; Aleister Crowley is listed in the index under his own name and as 'The Beast'!

William J. Fanning, Jr. Death Rays and the Popular Media, 1876-1939: A Study of Directed Energy Weapons in Fact, Fiction and Film. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2015. Does what it says on the tin (as they say): provides a thorough, if not exhaustive, study of deaths rays in (mostly) British, American and Australian (go Trove!) newspapers, novels and films -- including claims of actual death rays. After the mid-1920s and popularisation by Grindell-Mathews and stories of French aircraft mysteriously losing power over Germany, the idea became so widely recognisable that it was used in contexts far removed from speculative literature.

Peter Gray. Air Warfare: History, Theory and Practice. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Relatively short but very well-referenced. Looks like it would be an excellent postgrad-level textbook (which is exactly what it was designed for).

Alistair Horne. Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016. Horne's first book was published more than 60 years ago (!) but this is the first I've read. An engaging account of some key battles (Tsushima, Nomonhan, Moscow, Midway, Inchon and Dien Bien Phu), loosely connected by the knock-on effects of one battle on the next, and the theme of hubris.

Robert H. Kargon, Karen Fiss, Morris Low and Arthur P. Molella. World's Fairs on the Eve of War: Science, Technology, and Modernity 1937-1942. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015. I think I ordered this because of the whole aerial theatre/technology as spectacle thing, but I'm not sure. Takes in Paris, Düsseldorf, New York, Tokyo (cancelled) and Rome (cancelled). Well-illustrated for an academic monograph.

Bernard Lowry. Pillboxes and Tank Traps. Oxford and New York: Shire Publications, 2014. A small book with lots of photos of British fortifications from the Second World War. Nicely produced but obviously just skims the surface.

Glen O'Hara. Britain and the Sea since 1600. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. A synthesis which combines a thematic (trade, migration, war, etc) and chronological approach very well. Made me think about what a Britain and the Air since 1900 might look like...

Francis Spufford. Red Plenty. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Everybody but me has read this so it's probably time I caught up.

Richard Griffiths. What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2017. Billed as a sequel to Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933-9 (1983), which is one of my favourite history books. It is indeed pretty much a 'what did they do next?' for many of that book's shady characters. Unfortunately Griffiths doesn't seem to be as interested in the links between aviation/aviators and fascism as he was in Fellow Travellers; there's a chapter on the Master of Sempill, and people like A. V. Roe pop up here and there, but not much else. A chapter on the fascist infiltration of the peace movement doesn't seem to have much to say about the Duke of Bedford's involvement in the Bombing Restriction Committee. Still, looks like lots of fun.

Peter J. Beck. The War of the Worlds: From H. G. Wells to Orson Welles, Jeff Wayne, Steven Spielberg and Beyond. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. A history of the novel, its context and its influence, mixing in biography, literary and film (and radio) criticism as well. Takes in everything from the London Necropolis to The Battle of Dorking to the (supposed) panics caused by various radio adaptations.

Robin Archer, Joy Damousi, Murray Goot and Sean Scalmer, eds. The Conscription Conflict and the Great War. Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2016. A solid set of essays covering the Australian conscription debate from its political and philosophical origins to the way it has been remembered. The selling point for me was the comparative section, with one chapter by John Connor asking why conscription was a harder sell in some English-speaking countries than in others, and another by Ross McKibbin more closely comparing the issue in Britain and in Australia.

Lloyd Clark. Blitzkrieg: Myth, Reality and Hitler's Lightning War - France, 1940. London: Atlantic Books, 2016. Argues that the role of armour and airpower in the Fall of France has been exaggerated and that infantry was key (though it still can't avoid having that diving Stuka on the cover). More of a military history than Julian Jackson's excellent The Fall of France (2004), while similarly suggesting that a German victory was by no means inevitable.