John Feather. A History of British Publishing. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 2nd edition. Most of my primary sources, so far, are books; this will help me understand the economics and the ideologies of the book publishing industry.
Corey Robin. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. On the political uses of fear, from an American perspective. I like the titles of the first three chapters: "Fear", "Terror", "Anxiety".
Stephen Dorril. Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism. London: Viking, 2006. I'm always up for books on British fascism. This one is perhaps aiming to do a Kershaw -- a sort of history of the BUF through a biography of its leader. '[I]mportant and controversial', according to the blurb.
Medical Manual of Chemical Warfare. London: HMSO, 1939. A chance find in a secondhand bookshop -- an Australian reprint of a War Office publication dated March 1939. Lots of fun details of the various gases then known, their effects and how to treat them. Includes pictures and paintings of chemical burns and blisters, if you are into that sort of thing! (Update: it would seem to be the prior edition to this.)
P. G. Wodehouse. Right Ho, Jeeves. London: Penguin, 1999 [1934]. Somewhat lighter fare than the above!
Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds. Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945. London: Pimlico, 2006. Scholars of the calibre of Richard Overy and Tami Davis Biddle examine the Dresden raid from a variety of angles. Hew Strachan contributes a chapter on "Strategic bombing and the question of civilian casualties up to 1945". Why isn't he off writing the second volume of The First World War instead, that's what I'd like to know. I mean, just how long does it take to write another 1000-page-plus magisterial magnum opus anyway? :)
J. M. Kenworthy. Peace or War? New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. I ordered this back in January, before I realised that it's just Will Civilisation Crash? (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), under a different title. And a different pagination. Oh well.
David Zimmerman. Britain's Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe. Stroud: Sutton, 2001. A (the?) standard reference on the invention of radar. Has some details on a couple of unjustly neglected high technologies of the interwar period -- sound location and death rays.
A. C. Grayling. Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? London: Bloomsbury, 2006. I haven't really come to grips with the moral questions surrounding my subject yet (yes, bombing civilians is bad, but then war is generally not very nice, so ...), so I'll be interested to read this. I'll have to bear in mind that he's a philosopher, not an historian, though. (There's a review of the US edition in a recent Washington Post.)
Christian Wolmar. The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was Built and How it Changed the City Forever. London: Atlantic Books, 2005. Or, how Londoners had the foresight to build a system of public air raid shelters, and subsidised it by running trains between them -- decades before Kitty Hawk! Brilliant.
David Oliver. Hendon Aerodrome: A History. Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1994. Hendon was probably THE most important site for the cultivation of airmindedness in Britain up to the Second World War -- first as the home base of pioneer aviator Claude Grahame-White and friends, then from the 1920s as the location of the annual RAF Pageant, always attracting huge crowds. Today it's the location of the RAF Museum. This well-illustrated little book covers all of Hendon's aerial history, but of course gives pride of place to the Grahame-White and RAF Pageant days.
Malcolm Smith. Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Looks like another interesting entry in the burgeoning field of -- what do you call it? Mythologisation of war? Memorialisation? Studies of that stuff, anyway. By the author of British Air Strategy Between the Wars. The second chapter, entitled "The projection of war, 1918-1939" most closely relates to my own research.
John W. R. Taylor. Combat Aircraft of the World From 1909 to the Present. New York: Paragon, 1979. This was recommended to me by members of a mailing list -- I wanted a fairly comprehensive guide to combat aircraft that didn't just focus on the well-known ones from the World Wars, so that it would have the obscure French bombers and Polish fighters (or whatever!) of the 1920s and 1930s that never saw action. And this book is pretty much exactly what I was looking for (and more besides), and it's very well-illustrated too.
Andrew Boyle. Trenchard. London: Collins, 1962. Finally got around to buying a copy of the standard biography of a crucial figure in the early RAF.
L. E. O. Charlton. Charlton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. Charlton's autobiography, originally published in 1931 -- so after his almost-resignation from the RAF over bombing in Iraq, but before he became a well-known airpower pundit. A nice blue Penguin paperback, still in the original dust-jacket.
Constantine FitzGibbon. London's Burning. London: MacDonald & Co., 1970. This popular account of the Blitz was recommended to me as a source on pre-war fears of bombing. I'm not sure how useful it will be, but it was very cheap -- though still about 6 times the original $1.65 cover price!
Christopher Frayling. Things to Come. London: BFI Publishing, 1995. A little book about the big film of the even bigger book -- how it came to be, Wells' intimate involvement in the whole production, and why everyone in the future wears tunics with those giant triangular things over the shoulders. (Well, that's what I want to know, anyway ...)
Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper. Air Power: Naval, Military, Commercial. London: Chapman & Hall, 1917. On the lessons of the Great War for the future of airpower, and how after the war Britain can and must exercise control over the air as it has over the sea.
F. W. Hirst. The Six Panics and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1913. Hirst was the editor of the Economist. This is the only contemporary book I know of which discusses the airship panics (and then only in a single brief chapter). I've been looking for my own copy for years!
John Langdon-Davies. Air Raid: The Technique of Silent Approach, High Explosive, Panic. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938. A journalist who had witnessed the air raids on Barcelona applies his first-hand knowledge to the British case. He seems quite critical of the government's ARP literature.
Robert Graves. Goodbye to All That. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 [1929]. Another of the classic war books, that I should already have read.
David Powell. The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 1901-1914. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 1996. New books about Edwardian Britain are pretty thin on the ground (over here, anyway) so I got excited when I saw this and snapped it up. Of course, it's not new, it's 10 years old, and in fact I think I've actually already borrowed it from the uni library for some essay or other. Oh well, still a nice little book to own, rather expensive though.
Jim Winchester. The World's Worst Aircraft: From Pioneering Failures to Multimillion Dollar Disasters. London: Amber Books, 2005. I nearly didn't buy this, as it's not exactly a scholarly reference text. But I couldn't resist when I read the entry that 'the Flying Flea threatened to bring aviation to the man in the street, possibly by falling on him'! Other aircraft falling into (or onto) my area of interest include the Blackburn A.D. Scout, Bristol Braemar (with steam-powered Tramp variant), Sopwith LRTTr, and our man P-B's Nighthawk, as well as more familiar failures like the Battles, Stirlings, Defiants and Manchesters. Amusingly sarcastic.
