Peter Ewer. Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia's Air Defence Scandal. Chatswood: New Holland, 2009. Based on the author's PhD thesis, this looks at the politics of Australia's air policy before the war as well as the air attacks on Australia during it. It was a random find -- surprised I hadn't heard of it before, given that Ewer is a fellow Melburnian.

Geoffrey Wellum. First Light. London: Penguin, 2009 [2002]. One of the last great airmen's memoirs to come out of the Second World War. I've become more interested in reading some of these since reading The Flyer and Bomber Boys recently: Richard Hillary, Don Charlwood and so on.

C. G. Grey. A History of the Air Ministry. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940. A valuable compendium of information by a knowledgeable (though, Grey being Grey, hardly detached!) contemporary observer. The first section covers the period up to 1918 (including the Air Ministry's predecessors); the last the interwar period. In between there is a discussion of the Air Ministry's organisation, including lists the members of the Air Council. At the end there are some fold-out organisational charts -- it must have been printed before wartime paper shortages began to bite.

J. W. Dunne. An Experiment With Time. Library of the Serialist International, 2010 [1934]. Third edition. A curiosity, this. Dunne was Britain's first military aeroplane designer, and would have been its first military aeroplane pilot too, if his designs had flown at the first attempt in 1907-8. Ultimately Dunne had little lasting influence on British aviation, and he's much better known for this book, an attempt to explain dream premonitions scientifically, leading to his theory of 'serial time' (as I understand it, the past and future are simultaneous with the present, treating time like a spatial dimension). His ideas intrigued many people, from H. G. Wells (a family friend) to J. B. Priestley (Time and the Conways) and even the great astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, who perhaps should have known better. This is a facsimile edition published by the Library of the Serialist International, for which this post will shortly be the only Google hit! I think it's a local print-on-demand production; even though I doubt it has much aviation content I couldn't very well pass it up when I saw in the university bookshop.

Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds. Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain's Finest Hour, May to September 1940. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. An edited and unabridged collection of Ministry of Information intelligence reports on British public opinion in these crucial months. Lots of fascinating stuff, and very accessible too (context is provided by editorial comments for each week, and there's a glossary and a thorough index).

Joe Maiolo. Cry Havoc: The Arms Race and the Second World War, 1931-1941. London: John Murray, 2010. This was an automatic buy when I saw it on the new releases shelf. An arms race dynamic driving the great powers to war is a more familiar description of the period before the First World War than the Second, despite all the volumes on rearmament in the 1930s; it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Mark Mazower. Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe. London: Allen Lane, 2008. It's about time I picked up some Mazower (and at $15 I couldn't say no). Here he places the German occupation of Europe between 1939 and 1945 in the context of European imperialism -- the last great example of it, in fact. This kind of analysis might be a more convincing way into the idea that strategic bombing had something to do with race and imperialism than Sven Lindqvist's approach.

Ashley Ekins, ed. 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History. Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010. This is the product of a conference held at the Australian War Memorial in 2008, and features contributions from people like Jay Winter, Robin Prior, Gary Sheffield, Trevor Wilson and Stephen Badsey, among others, with chapters on 1918 from the perspective from various armies and arms (Peter Hart has a chapter on the air war, for example). It's encouraging to see a non-specialist Australian/New Zealand publisher putting out a serious work of military history which takes an international view (even if Australia does get as many chapters as Germany).

The Earl of Avon. The Eden Memoirs: Facing the Dictators. London: Cassell, 1962. The most famous British politician to ever wear an Anthony Eden. Also Foreign Secretary 1935-8 and later did other stuff.

Roy Jenkins. Mr Balfour's Poodle: People v. Peers. London: Papermac, 1999 [1954]. The People's Budget and the 1910 General Elections. An interesting time in British politics, unlike the present day.

Patrick Bishop. Bomber Boys: Fighting Back 1940-1945. London: Harper Perennial, 2008. I liked his Fighter Boys and have been meaning to pick this up; Martin Francis in The Flyer (which is also v.g.) gave them both big props and so that was a sufficient reminder.

H. G. Hartnett. Over the Top: A Digger's Story of the Western Front. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2009. Hartnett was an enlisted soldier of the 2nd Battalion AIF who fought from Pozières until the end of the First World War. He's also my first cousin, thrice removed, as it turns out. This is his memoir of the war, which was written in the early 1920s based on the diary he kept at the time.

Garry Campion. The Good Fight: Battle of Britain Propaganda and the Few. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Looking forward to reading this book, which looks at looks at how the Battle of Britain and The Few were portrayed in the press, in official propaganda, plays, film, overseas, from the ground, etc. It even discusses the novelty of contrails!

Martin Francis. The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force, 1939-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. I've been hearing good things about this. The glamour of the airman and how it interacted with class, gender and race.

Juliet Gardiner. The Thirties: An Intimate History. London: Harper Press, 2010. In similar vein to her Wartime, portrays British society from a wide variety of angles using a wide variety of sources. But are the 1930s really 'Britain's forgotten decade', as the front cover has it?