Ian Castle. London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace. Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008.

Ian Castle. London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

Kate Moore. The Battle of Britain. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

Gavin Mortimer. The Blitz: An Illustrated History. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

These are all review copies! For those familiar with Osprey books, the two books by Castle are from their 'Campaign' series; but instead of showing the clash of armies, the numerous maps show the fall of bombs. The other two are in a more unusual coffee table format, lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs (Moore's draws upon the Imperial War Museum archives, Mortimer's on the Mirror group of newspapers).

James Hamilton-Paterson. Empire of the Clouds: When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. 'When' is the decade or two after 1945. Apparently not quite as triumphalist as the subtitle would suggest. Has a rather Commando cover featuring a Vulcan. Looks like fun.

Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. I was in the mood for a Cold War history when I came across this. I enjoyed Wright's Tank and I hope this will display a similar combination of verve and erudition.

A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. A collection of essays on pretty much what it says on the tin. A slight majority of contributions are on aspects of memory of the war rather than the war itself, including two by bloggers -- Dan Todman of Trench Fever ('Remembrance') and Esther MacCallum-Stewart of the sadly-defunct Break of Day in the Trenches ('A biplane in Gnomeregan: popular culture and the First World War'). I'm grateful to Esther for (1) citing Airminded in an actual book (made out of paper and everything) and (2) thereby getting into print the word 'historioblogosphere', which I invented and carefully crafted to be as off-putting as possible.

Philip Towle. Going to War: British Debates from Wilberforce to Blair. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A short and occasionally polemic book which covers a lot of ground. First looks at how different sections of society have dealt with the question of war -- including novelists such as H. G. Wells and Nevil Shute, and 'armchair strategists' like J. M. Spaight, all persons of interest to me -- before winding up with the question: do such debates matter? Sensibly confines most discussion of Iraq and Afghanistan to the penultimate chapter.

Justin E. A. Busch. The Utopian Vision of H. G. Wells. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, 2009. Not sure about this one. There's no doubt that Wells had a utopian vision, several of them in fact, but the index has about three dozen references for Plato as well as fifteen or so for F. A. Hayek, which seem like odd preoccupations for a book on Wells.

Ruth Henig. The League of Nations. London: Haus Publishing, 2010. A short history of the League -- its successes, its failures... well, mostly its failures, I guess. Part of a big (mostly biographical) series on 'The peace conferences of 1919-23 and their aftermath'.

Tammy M. Proctor. Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918. New York and London: New York University Press, 2010. Covers the civilian experience of the First World War globally in a number of contexts, such as in industry, in internment and in revolution. She argues that the war created the ideas of the civilian and the home front, an idea I am sympathetic towards.

Patrick Deer. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Argues that Britain developed a 'war culture' in the Second World War which was very different to that of the First and which 'colonised' the national consciousness in the rest of the century. It's from a literature perspective so it may not hold up as history. Has a chapter on airmindedness.

Daniel Swift. Bomber County. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. Partly an account of the attempt by the author -- an English lit professor -- to understand what happened to his grandfather, a Lancaster pilot shot down during a raid on Münster, as well as to the people he bombed, it also makes the argument that the bombing war produced poetry comparable with that which came of the trenches in the previous war. Note: review copy.

It's taken me just over five years to get to my 100th 'acquisitions' post... which seems surprisingly slow, I have to say!

Michael Molkentin. Fire in the Sky: The Australian Flying Corps in the First World War. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010. A topic I don't know much about. Looks well-researched, and on p. xviii Molkentin says he has intentionally avoided the 'aces and aeroplanes' approach. Excellent!

Peter Stanley. Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force. Millers Point and London: Pier 9, 2010. I think the title and the picture on the cover give a pretty good idea of where this one is going. Stanley does a nice line in iconoclasm, too, having tackled the 1942 myth in a previous book.

Alan Allport. Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. The book of the dissertation, on which the blog of the book of the dissertation is based!

Gordon Pirie. Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919-39. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009. A book which has been a long time coming: about fifty years, in fact, the length of time since the last scholarly monograph devoted to this topic (Higham's Britain's Imperial Air Routes 1918-1939). Looks like it was worth the wait. Note: review copy (not for Airminded).

Graham Greene. The Ministry of Fear. London: Vintage Books, 2001 [1943]. One of Greene's lesser-known thrillers. Some evocative portraits of London during the Blitz, as when the protagonist looks out over battered Battersea and sees that 'Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar sticks'. The world is described as having 'been remade by William Le Queux', though I reckon there's some Noel Pemberton Billing in it too.