R. J. B. Bosworth. Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship, 1915-1945. London: Penguin, 2006. I have plenty of books on generic fascism, German fascism, British fascism ... so one on the original fascism doesn't seem excessive!

Paul Kennedy. The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government. London: Allen Lane, 2006. Only one chapter on the pre-1945 period, mostly the League of Nations of course. Actually I should track down a decent history of the League one day.

Scott W. Palmer. Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. I followed Scott's advice, but as I don't have a car or an office, I ended up with only one copy :) It looks like a worthy companion to Corn and Fritzsche, and indeed, now that it's finally arrived (only 3 months after I ordered it, thanks Amazon.co.uk) I plan to read it alongside those standard works on national airmindedness.

Vera Brittain. One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Consists two of her wartime works, Humiliation with Honour (1942) and Seed of Chaos (1944), a condemnation of RAF area bombing. Scholarly introduction by Aleksandra Bennett, foreword by Shirley Williams.

Peter Cooksley. The Home Front: Civilian Life in World War One. Stroud: Tempus, 2006. I don't normally buy histories without references, but this one has lots of interesting and unusual photos, much of it related to the German air raids (all of Cooksley's couple of dozen previous books are aviation history). Searchlight trams -- who knew?

James S. Corum. The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-1940. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. This will be a helpful reality check, as I spend so much time reading (usually greatly exaggerated) accounts of the capabilities and intentions of the German air force.

Peter Fleming. Invasion 1940: An Account of the German Preparations and the British Counter-measures. London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1957. An early history of Operation Sealion (by Ian Fleming's older brother; he had the job of organising resistance in Kent and Sussex should the Germans invade). Looks like it has some interesting bits about popular (or at least press) reactions to the threat of invasion as well as the air war.

Lorna Arnold. Britain and the H-bomb. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001. Well, at least they weren't blowing up bits of Australia this time! Got this cheap -- last time I saw it, it was about 6 times the price. Glad I held off.

Lisa Blackman and Valerie Walkerdine. Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001. Another cheapie, might be useful for my phantom airship stuff, if I ever get back to that.

J. M. Spaight. An International Air Force. London: Gale & Polden, n.d. [1932]. Spaight's take on the international air police concept, essentially that if it happens it will be in some distant future after the way has been paved for it by the development of national air forces.

Reginald Berkeley. Cassandra. London: Victor Gollancz, 1931. A workers' uprising and a Soviet invasion (including the inevitable aerial bombardment), along with a future archaeologist digging through the ruins of London -- as seen via clairvoyant visions of things to come! Looks like fun.

Hamish Blair. Governor Hardy. London: Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1931. Looks to be a sequel to 1957.

Hamish Blair. The Great Gesture. London: Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1931. Might be a knock-out blow novel -- doesn't really look like it. I bought these books by Blair partly on spec, and it doesn't really look like it has paid off. Though they were quite cheap, I need to be more careful about this in future.

L. E. O. Charlton. The Secret Aerodrome. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Charlton tries his hand at juvenile fiction, boy's own stuff out on the fringes of Empire.

John Connell. David Go Back. London: Cassell and Company, 1935. A Scottish revolution against English rule. Not sure how aerial it is (see above).

David Davies. Suicide or Sanity? An Examination of the Proposals before the Geneva Disarmament Conference. London: Williams and Norgate, 1932. Lord Davies puts forward the case for an international police force.

C. G. Grey. Bombers. London: Faber and Faber, 1941. The pro-German, fascist-leaning former editor of The Aeroplane gives his thoughts on the evolution of bombing and its use in the present war. DID YOU KNOW: the G. stands for "Grey"!

James P. Levy. Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain, 1936-1939. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Argues that appeasement was 'an active, logical, and morally defensible foreign policy designed to avoid and deter a potentially devastating war' (according to the blurb, anyway). Should be interesting!

Leslie Reid. Cauldron Bubble. London: Victor Gollancz, 1934. A bit of an oddity -- a Ruritanian novel where Edwal (Wales) rises up against Grendel (England), which in turn gets involved in a war with Belmark (Germany) -- including aerial bombardment. The real identities of the countries involved are so obvious that one wonders why the author bothered to obscure them.

Siegfried Sassoon. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. London: Faber and Faber, 1999 [1928]. This and the following are part of my ongoing quest for self-improvement.

Siegfried Sassoon. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber, 2000 [1930].

Hamish Blair. 1957. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1930. Something a bit different -- an air control novel, instead of a knock-out blow one; India ablaze instead of London. As the dust-jacket ominously says, '1857: Indian Mutiny. 1957: ?' Luckily 1947 came first.

John Ramsden. Don't Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890. London: Little, Brown, 2006. It was all downhill after Three Men on the Bummel ... I love the title, and it looks like an insightful book on an important topic; but what's with having the endnotes not in the book itself but on a website? Do they think websites are permanent? Will the 10 pages omitted from the book really improve its profitability by that much? It's better than none at all, I suppose, but it does potentially diminish the book's useability for research purposes, now and in the future. For shame, Little, Brown, for shame.

Antony Beevor. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. The Spanish Civil War was a crucial event in British airpower history. I have the first edition of this book, but I haven't read it yet, so ...

Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage, eds. Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia. North Carlton: Arena Publications Association, 2006. The proceedings of a conference held at Monash University in 2005. A bit too litcrit/cultstud for my liking, but 'topias are part of my thing, so ...

Templewood. Empire of the Air: The Advent of the Air Age, 1922-1929. London: Collins, 1957. Before being raised to the peerage as Viscount Templewood, Samuel Hoare had been a long-serving Tory Secretary of State for Air in 1922-4 and 1924-9 (and again, briefly, in 1940). This is his memoir of the golden age of aviation.

H. G. Wells. The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind. London: Macmillan and Co., 1914. The novel that unleashed atomic warfare upon the world. I actually already have a copy but it's a modern edition, and I'd prefer to reference an original edition, where possible. Besides which, the University of Nebraska Press inexplicably changed the title of their edition from The World Set Free to The Last War, which abomination I don't want stinking up my bibliography!