Peter Williams. The Kokoda Campaign 1942: Myth and Reality. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012. This is one of those topics I should know more about, being a military historian and an Australian and all. Ordinarily I might be wary of a book with 'myth and reality' in the title, but it's unlikely to be sensationalist revisionism as it's published in association with the Army History Unit. In fact it is based on Japanese archival sources as well as Australian ones, which Williams uses to show, for example, that the idea that Australian forces were massively outnumbered (thus excusing the bits where we got beaten) is untrue.

Peter Adey. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. The title isn't very revealing of its contents. But here's a partial list of the topics covered: airminded youth groups such as the Air Defence Cadet Corps and the Skybird League (chapter 2), air shows including Hendon (chapter 3), the birth of aerial surveying (chapter 4), RAF pilot selection techniques (chapter 5), wartime experiments on the effects of bomb-blast on buildings and bodies (chapter 6), the effectiveness of ARP drills (chapter 7). There is even room for scareships! While it is framed as cultural geography the history looks solid and this book should interest anyone interested in British airmindedness.

Susan R. Grayzel. At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. As will this one, which is even closer to my own particular interests. In fact the topic is broadly that of my PhD thesis and my book; and if it had been published ten or even five years ago I probably would have picked something else to do! Having said that, I think our approaches are sufficiently different not to make my book redundant: at first glance, hers is more cultural history with some political history, mine is more intellectual history with some cultural history. Plus, mine has scareships. Still, I'm both looking forward to and dreading reading this...

Ronnie Scott, ed. The Real 'Dad's Army': The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster. London: Virago, 2011. Foster was a retired Indian Army officer who commanded a Home Guard company in Kent in the Second World War. Looks interesting: takes a lively interest in the progress of the war, but is also engaged with his local community; has a liking for double exclamation marks. What clinched it for me was the first sentence of the entry for 16 July 1944: 'Robots came over at regular intervals all morning from 10 a.m.'

Herbert A. Johnson. Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Looks at not just the actual flying stuff (the first flights, the expedition against Pancho Villa, the expansion for war) but the media portrayal of such (e.g. chapter 2, 'Army aviation in the media fishbowl'). So I think it will be very much to my taste; not bad for a bargain table find!

Helen M. Kinsella. The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2011. As the title suggests it's not really the sort of book you turn to for who said (or did) what to whom and why; it's also written by a political scientist, not a historian, but we'll let that pass. Starts with medieval codes of warfare but mostly concentrates on the 20th century, especially the 1949 IV Geneva Convention and the 1977 Protocol to it.

C. G. Burge, ed. The Air Annual of the British Empire 1939. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1939. A comprehensive overview of the state of the British aviation industry as of the start of 1939, from the big aircraft manufacturers down to (for example) Cellon Ltd., makers of cellulose dope since 1911. Also articles on the state of the art and future prospects in many aspects of aviation, lots and lots of advertisements, and some very interesting statistics and other reference material at the back (if you intend to fly to Zanzibar, you must give the Aviation Control Officer at Kisauni Customs Aerodrome two hours' notice -- telegraph 'Aviation Zanzibar').

Joseph Heller. Catch-22. London: Vintage Books, 2011 [1962]. A true classic, which I haven't read since high school. To mark the 50th anniversary of its original publication, includes 50 pages of reviews and commentary, some of the latter by Heller himself. Christmas win!

John Slessor. The Great Deterrent: A Collection of Lectures, Articles, and Broadcasts on the Development of Strategic Policy in the Nuclear Age. London: Cassell & Company, 1957. Published by Slessor after retiring as Chief of the Air Staff, though some of the pieces date as far back as 1933. The 'great deterrent' is the hydrogen bomb, but (in these pre-Sandys, pre-Sputnik days) delivered by good old-fashioned bombers, not missiles: 'It is the bomber that could turn the vast spaces that were Russia's prime defence against Napoleon and Hindenburg and Hitler into a source of weakness rather than strength'.

David Crotty. A Flying Life: John Duigan and the First Australian Aeroplane. Melbourne: Museum Victoria, 2010. The first Australian-built aeroplane to fly, to be specific. Also covers Duigan's career as an AFC RE8 pilot on the Western Front where he won his Military Cross.

Malcolm Hall. From Balloon to Boxkite: The Royal Engineers and Early British Aeronautics. Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2010. J. E. Capper, Baden Baden-Powell, Samuel F. Cody and all the other magnificent men. Briefly covers late-19th century military ballooning but really gets going with the South African War, ending up with the Air Battalion, the RFC's immediate predecessor. Lots of illustrations.

Augustine Meaher IV. The Australian Road to Singapore: The Myth of British Betrayal. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. The book of the thesis of a former fellow PhD student. As the title suggests, it's a strong attack on the prevalent idea (hi David Day!) that the British failure to defend Singapore amount to a betrayal of Australia, arguing that instead it was we who failed to devote enough resources to our own military forces in the 1920s and 1930s.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie; oi, oi, oi.

Neville Meaney. A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy, 1901-23. Volume 1,The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901-14. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 [1976]. Neville Meaney. A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy, 1901-23. Volume 2, Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009. I want to understand Australia's perceptions of the outside world in the First World War period and what effect those perceptions might have had on the home front. This now-completed two-volume work does try to cover both high diplomacy and domestic politics so I hope it's a good start here.

Christopher Waters. Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of World War II. London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2012. A book from the future! This looks like fun. As the subtitle suggests, I think it will be of interest to more than just Australian historians: lukewarm support from the Dominions was one reason why Chamberlain hesitated to go to war over the Sudetenland, for example. It does seem a bit odd, however, that while Japan does get a fair few mentions in the index, the focus is on Europe. Especially with the nice photo of 'Pig-Iron Bob' Menzies on the dustjacket...

Martin Middlebrook. The Battle of Hamburg: Allied Bomber Forces Against a German City in 1943. London: Cassell & Co., 2000 [1980]. I picked this up partly because of the topic (obviously), partly because it has an account of the action for which Pilot Officer E. L. Pickles was awarded his first DFC (nursing his Lancaster home after a night-fighter attack which killed two of his crew and wounded another; my mother knew him slightly when she was growing up -- amazingly he's still flying), partly because it was only $10 (why am I justifying this to you?)

Eric Ash. Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution 1912-1918. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999. An excellent study of a important figure in the early days of the RAF who has been overshadowed by his rival, predecessor and successor Trenchard: he was certainly a stauncher supporter of strategic bombing at this time. Sykes was also the friend and patron of P. R. C. Groves.

Anthony Christopher Cain. The Forgotten Air Force: French Air Doctrine in the 1930s. Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Cain argues that while French air doctrine was unsound, the reason was not that French airmen were decadent, traitorous or stupid (to paraphrase the title of his concluding chapter), but that they were let down by non-airmen who didn't understand airpower. (The Armée de l'Air didn't become independent until 1933.) Some glorious photographs of interwar French bombers.

John R. Davis with Susanne Everill. Grants for History 2012: A Guide to Funding. London: Institute of Historical Research, 2011. Don't laugh.

A. D. Harvey. Body Politic: Political Metaphor and Political Violence. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Harvey has written a number of articles on airpower history, but this is something completely different. It's a history of the notion that the organisation of human societies resemble human bodies, and in some way therefore work in the same way. Hobbes's Leviathan is probably the most famous example, but it wasn't the first and it wasn't the last.

Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine 1945-1961 (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011). Argues that Eisenhower worked to normalise nuclear weapons in both the American arsenal and the American consciousness. This early period of the Cold War, when the bomb took over from the bomber as the threat to civilisation, always intrigues me. Note: review copy.