Had some good luck browsing in secondhand bookshops this week … Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. The Burning Blue: The Battle of Britain, 1940. Hanford: GMT Games, 2006. NOT a book, a wargame simulating the “plotting table” war, if you like. Product page. Well-researched, as the support page shows. DOES have Boulton-Paul Defiants, does NOT have Gladiators. Donald […]
Andrew P. Hyde. The First Blitz: The German Air Campaign against Britain 1917-1918 . Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2002. A bit disappointing, looks like your standard pot-boiler account (and no references to speak of). Still, it was dirt cheap. Joseph Morris. The German Air Raids on Britain, 1914-1918. Darlington: Naval & Military Press, 1993 [1925]. Unlike
It’s been way too hot this week to blog, whatever energy I could muster I put towards that thesis thing. Instead, there’s this: David Edgerton. Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Expands upon the suggestion put forward in England and the Aeroplane that the fabled British welfare state is more aptly described
I noticed that I had a few inches of spare shelf space last week, so … Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper. The Aeroplane in War. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1912. A big survey of military aviation before the First World War – keeping the reading public informed about such innovations as the ‘engine-in-front biplane’. Grahame-White
Stephen Bungay. The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain. London: Aurum Press, 2000. Recent-ish and apparently revisionist.
W.E. Johns. Biggles and the Black Peril. London: Red Fox, 2004 [1935]. I felt a bit silly standing in the children’s section of the bookshop looking through all their Biggles books, but I guess I could have pretended I was buying it for a nephew or something …
Basil Collier. Heavenly Adventurer: Sefton Brancker and the Dawn of British Aviation. London: Secker & Warburg, 1959. A big wheel in the RFC, for most of the 1920s he was in charge of civil aviation at the Air Ministry. He was killed in the R101 disaster in 1930. Peter Lewis. The British Fighter Since 1912:
Geoffrey Best. Churchill and War. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005. As previously noted. There’s disappointingly little on Churchill’s “wilderness years” – OK, so there wasn’t actually a war on then, but this was the time when the foundations of the Churchill-as-prophet-of-war legend were laid. And it’s the period of his career that
Ann Curthoys and John Docker. Is History Fiction? Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006.Sic. On truth in history; seems to be attempting a third way between, or at least taking the good bits from both postmodernism and empiricism. My glib answer to the question in the title would be, not if you’re doing it right! (Which probably
Agatha Christie. Death in the Clouds. London: HarperCollins, 2001 [1935]. I am ashamed to admit it, but I have read very little British fiction from the early twentieth century, aside from thesis-related stuff and some science fiction. So I’m trying to remedy that, by reading characteristic and/or significant novels from my period. Christie’s Hercule Poirot
