Ron Austin. The Fighting Fourth: A History of Sydney's 4th Battalion 1914-19. McCrae: Slouch Hat Publications, 2007. Private Mulqueeney's unit, though the poor sod was with it in the field for only a couple of months before his death. It had earlier landed at Gallipoli, on the first day; and after the Somme fought at 3rd Ypres, Broodseinde, Polygon Wood and the Hindenburg Line, among other places. This is, surprisingly, the first history of the 4th Battalion AIF; it looks to have done it justice as far as writing and production quality goes (it's fairly sparsely footnoted, but I suppose that's not what unit histories are about).

Philip Williamson. Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Stan, me old mucker!

Alan Kramer. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. The barbarisation of warfare from the Balkan wars onward, including the targeting of civilians. This looks the goods (and a worthy successor to the book he co-authored with John Horne, German Atrocities, 1914), though oddly there's only a little on bombing. Not that I'm complaining, mind ...

Peter Stansky. The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. From the blurb, 'Much of the future of Britain was determined in the first twelve hours of bombing' -- the Blitz spirit was just the start of a social revolution. Hmmm, that's a big claim, but not necessarily an incorrect one: it'll be interesting to see if he can pull it off.

I ordered these months before I left for London; of course they only turned up a couple of weeks after I left!

Basil Collier. The Defence of the United Kingdom. Uckfield: Naval and Military Press, 2004 [1957]. The volume of the official British history of the Second World War dealing primarily with air defence, but also the threat of invasion.

Henry Probert. Bomber Harris: His Life and Times. London: Greenhill Books, 2003. The standard biography of Harris. Not all that relevant for me -- I think I got it cheap ...

Keith Rennles. Independent Force: The War Diaries of the Daylight Squadrons of the Independent Air Force, June-November 1918. London: Grub Street, 2002. I would have preferred a straight history of the Independent Force but this at least tells me what it was actually doing.

Raymond H. Fredette. The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain 1917-1918 and the Birth of the Royal Air Force. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991 [1966]. Even though it's now over 40 years old, this is still the best book around on the Gotha raids on Britain in 1917-8.

F. S. Northedge. The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920-1946. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986. Similarly, library shelves aren't exactly overflowing with histories of the League of Nations, so I nabbed this when I saw it!

Clive Harris. Walking the London Blitz. Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2006. I haven't been buying lots of travel-type books, but I could hardly pass this one up!

Nevil Shute. On the Beach. Geneva: Edito-Service S.A., 1968 [1957]. Finally found it.

I've been good, I really have! I haven't bought any books for ages, since I've been economising in advance of the UK trip. But yesterday I went looking for a Shute to take with me, and couldn't find one, but instead came away with an armful of other books.

Midge Gillies. Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion. London: Hodder & Staughton, 2006. Summer, 1940. Should be an interesting complement to my own research on the early Blitz, though this leaves off where I start.

Peter Padfield. The Great Naval Race: Anglo-German Naval Rivalry, 1900-1914. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005 [1974]. A good narrative history which I've used before, now with a new introduction assessing some of the historiography since it was originally published (in particular, the contributions of Sumida and Lambert). Next to it on the shelf was a new book on the same topic, with a very similar title. It looks brilliant but it's $160 (not far short of £70)! Utterly ridiculous.

Anne Perkins. A Very British Strike: 3 May-12 May 1926. London: Pan, 2007. I've been looking for a decent book on the General Strike for ages, and this looks like it fits the bill.

I ordered these before I realised just how broke I'll be after the UK trip. Oy vey ...

David Clarke and Andy Roberts. Flying Saucerers: A Social History of Ufology. Loughborough: Alternative Albion, 2007. A social history of British ufology, at any rate. Did you know that Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding believed that UFOs were interplanetary spacecraft? Well, you do now.

Stanley Cohen. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Abingdon: Routledge, 2002. Third edition. Classic.

Beau Grosscup. Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment. London and New York: Zed Books, 2006. Rather polemical, and I don't like his reliance upon Trenchard and Liddell Hart as representative of British airpower advocates. But it seems to have more theoretical approach to the subject than most, which is kind of interesting in itself; and it was cheap!

Ross McKibbin. Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Another nice, fat social/cultural history which I'll apparently never have time to read. Didn't realise the author was Australian.

Ian Patterson. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007. This has already been mentioned here a couple of times in recent days; uses Guernica as a starting point to explore total air war, via the fears of bombing as expressed in popular literature. Unlike Grosscup (above), it looks like he's read all the right books!

Mark Connelly. Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001. Since I had this on semi-permanent loan from the library, it seemed only logical to buy my own copy. Only partly an operational history, so not the place to turn to for a bomb-by-bomb account; it's more concerned with the big picture, including the reactions to area bombing by the British press and public, during and since the war. (NB. Connelly's latest book has just been reviewed at Trench Fever.)