Philip Anthony Towle. Pilots and Rebels: The Use of Aircraft in Unconventional Warfare 1918-1988. London: Brassey's, 1989. From air control to counterinsurgency. A bit RAF-centric until after 1945.

Jan Rüger. The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. A book I cited in my thesis. I don't see why the library should have all the fun.

Charles Sowerwine. France Since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Second Edition. French history is one of my weak points. If I'd taken one of Chips' classes -- he retired from my former department a few years ago -- I might not have needed to buy his book. But I probably would have anyway!

As I said... I went back for more Shute!

Neville Shute. No Highway. London: Vintage Books, 2009 [1948]. Not about the Comet and its metal-fatigue induced accidents, because it was written before the prototype even flew.

Neville Shute. Pastoral. London: Vintage Books, 2009 [1944]. A Bomber Command romance.

I went on a mini-spending spree this week -- mini because Vintage have recently cut their prices in Australia and are cheap as chips.

Graham Greene. Brighton Rock. London: Vintage Books, 2004 [1938]. 'Now a major motion picture'.

Aldous Huxley. Ape and Essence. London: Vintage Books, 2005 [1949]. I couldn't resist this after reading the blurb, which begins: 'In February 2108, the New Zealand Rediscovery Expedition reaches California.' Huxley's atomic war novel.

Nevil Shute. Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer. London: Vintage Books, 2009 [1954]. Shute's account of his early career as an aeronautical engineer, when he worked on the R100 and co-founded Airspeed. Vintage have reissued most, if not all, of Shute's back catalogue and I will no doubt be buying more of them!

Rex Warner. The Aerodrome: A Love Story. London: Vintage Books, 2007 [1941]. A book I've been wanting to read since before starting my PhD. Fascism and aviation in Deep England.

Juliet Gardiner. The Blitz: The British Under Attack. London: HarperPress, 2010. Another example of anniversary publishing, but I wouldn't have misgivings about buying a Juliet Gardiner book. Except... I worry that it will cover too much of the same ground as her Wartime.

Robin Higham and Frederick W. Kagan, eds. The Military History of the Soviet Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 [2002]. The definite article seems oddly, well, definite. But the table of contents does look comprehensive: airminded contributions include 'The Soviet air force, 1917-1991' by Mark O'Neill and 'Soviet/Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945-2000' by Stephen J. Zaloga.

Peter Hennessy. The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010. London: Penguin, 2010. Second edition. The instant classic on how the British government has gone about defending the realm, particularly in preparations for the Third World War. Hennessy has updated it with information from masses of newly declassified files from the Cold War, and has a first stab at telling the story of the post 9/11-era.

Xmas wins!

Gus Officer. Six O'Clock Diamond: The Story of a Desert Harrasser. Northcote: Woolhouse Press, 2008. The memoir of a Second World War RAAF Kittyhawk pilot, who in 1942 was shot down over the Western Desert and spent the rest of the war as a POW.

Roland Perry. The Australian Light Horse: The Magnificent Australian Force and its Decisive Victories in Arabia in World War I. Sydney: Hachette Australia, 2009. A bit of a family connection here, as a couple of great-great-uncles were in the Light Horse. The subtitle gives me pause, however; but one probably shouldn't expect any better from the author of Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War.

J. M. Spaight. Volcano Island. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943. Although Spaight is one of my guys, I didn't know from the title alone if it was even about aviation. Turns out that it is; here's the blurb from the front dustjacket:

IN 1939, our Island was peaceful and innocuous; now in 1943, with its volcanic battlestations of Bomber Command, it has the most terrific capacity for far-reaching destruction the world has ever known.

My copy came with a bonus: a clipping from the Daily Telegraph date 12 February 1960 about a lecture given by P. M. S. Blackett about the Tizard-Lindemann clashes before the war and other matters relating to air defence and offence: Tizard 'related that at one meeting [of the Air Council] the main business was the inspection of an exhibition of different designs of W.A.A.F. underwear.'

Roger Beaumont. Might Backed by Right: The International Air Force Concept. Westport and London: Praeger, 2001. Some library gap-filling: it's the only book on the history of the international air force idea there is, so I ought to have it. Doesn't devote enough attention to the 1920s and 1930s for my liking, but for once I at least did something about it rather than just sat back and complained.

Matthew Grant. After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945-68. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. One I've been looking forward to for a while. But why aren't there any similar books on ARP?

George H. Quester. Deterrence Before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy. New York, London and Sydney: John Wiley & Sons, 1966. More gap-filling. Again it's a unique book -- there's nowhere else you can turn for an overview of intellectual reactions to the coming of the bomber in such a wide variety of countries (well, the major powers anyway), especially chapters 5 and 6 on the interwar period. The main problem, aside from it being published in 1966 (there was a 1986 reprint with a new introduction, but unfortunately that didn't discuss the more recent secondary literature) is hinted at in the title: it's a contribution to Cold War IR theory, not history.