So, I bought so many books in the UK that I had to post some of them home to myself; here are some of them. You might ask why I didn’t just note down the names of all these books and order them when I got back to Australia, but such a self-evidently absurd question […]
Bryn Hammond. Cambrai 1917: The Myth of the First Great Tank Battle. London: Phoenix, 2009. I was telling my students about Cambrai only yesterday… well, I mentioned it to them, anyway. Hammond argues that it was the improved British artillery doctrine that was the key breakthrough at Cambrai, rather than the massed tank assault it
Liz Millward. Women in British Imperial Airspace, 1922-1937. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008. A pioneering gender history of aviatrices in the British Empire, including Lady Heath, Amy Johnson, and above all the New Zealander Jean Batten. Not only is this potentially relevant to my aerial spectacle project, but Millward has more recently been looking at
Kristen Alexander. Australia’s Few and the Battle of Britain. Sydney: NewSouth, 2014. As an Australian, every time I watch Battle of Britain I notice the mention of the 21 Australian pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, and the 14 who were killed (these numbers are actually undercounts). This is the story of eight
Alison Bashford. Global Population: History, Geopolitics, and Life on Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. This was launched at the Australian Historical Association conference this week and looked like fun — an intellectual history of eugenics, birth control, food supply and, of course, world population, from the 1920s to the 1960s — so I
Free books! The Earl of Avon. The Eden Memoirs: Full Circle. London: Cassell, 1960. I already have the volume of Eden’s memoirs covering his life up until 1938, so it’s nice to complete the set. This one covers his postwar career; it’s interesting to note that it was actually published first, out of chronological order,
Brett Holman. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. :D
Eric Hobsbawm. The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. London: Abacus, 1995. I’ve just been rereading Hobsbawm’s trilogy on the long 19th century, and realised I hadn’t read his book on the short 20th century, and so here we are.
Kenneth R. Sealy. The Geography of Air Transport. London: Hutchinson University Library, 1966. Revised edition. A bit outside my usual timeframe, but I had to rescue it from a secondhand bookshop. Lots of statistics and maps about world aviation in the early jet age, but also going back to the interwar period. If I ever
James Brown. Anzac’s Long Shadow: The Cost of Our National Obsession. Collingwood: Redback, 2014. Brown has garnered a lot of attention recently for his critique of the Anzac myth. What is perhaps most interesting about his position is that he isn’t coming at the question from a historical or even political position: his argument is
