Bradshaw's International Air Guide. Oxford and New York: Old House, 2013 [1934]. I'm a sucker for facsimile reproductions like this. Bradshaw's are best known for their compilations of [added: railway] timetables for the Continental traveller, but beginning in 1934 they did the same for air routes. You also get airport information, hotel advertisements, standard air travel rules and regulations (you couldn't take arms on board, for example, unless they were for 'hunting or sporting' and 'packed in such a manner as to cause no danger to persons or things', 159), and a nice pull-out map showing the world's air routes (which clearly reveals the Anglocentric nature of Bradshaw's: it doesn't show any North American or Australian routes because they didn't connect with flights out of Europe).

Robin Holmes. The Battle of Heligoland Bight 1939: The Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe's Baptism of Fire. London: Grub Street, 2009. The Battle of Heligoland Bight was a daylight raid on Wilhelmshaven on 18 December 1939 in which just over half the RAF force was lost, leading to the suspicion that the bomber might not always get through. This book focuses on the fortunes of one particular Wellington and its crew, but also takes in the wider story of the raid.

Richard Overy. The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945. London: Allen Lane, 2013. This is a bit of a magnum opus. There are few people as well placed as Overy to write a deep summation of and reflection upon what we know now about strategic bombing in Europe in the Second World War (there's even a chapter on the Soviet experience), and by all accounts he has succeeded brilliantly. I've been waiting for this with some impatience and look forward to reading it (when I have a few weeks to spare -- with endnotes, it's just over 800 pages in length).

Picked up both of these at the Shrine of Remembrance, while visiting to see the new Bomber Command exhibition. Of which, more another day.

Don Charlwood. Journeys into Night. Warrandyte: Burgewood Books, 2013 [1991]. I discussed Charlwood's memoir of the war recently; this is a sort of collective memoir of the twenty men who formed his Empire Air Training Scheme class, three quarters of whom didn't survive the war. Charlwood himself made it, not only through the war, but until last year.

Bruce Scates with Alexandra McCosker, Keir Reeves, Rebecca Wheatley and Damien Williams. Anzac Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of World War II. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013. This is a history of the Australian memory of war, specifically in the form of pilgrimage to foreign battlefields, whether by veterans, family, or people without direct connections to war. Includes chapters on Bomber Command and Darwin.

Friedrich von Bernhardi. Germany and the Next War. London: Edward Arnold, 1914. This book by a German general laid bare Germany's ruthless plans for world conquest for all to see -- all who ignored the fact that Bernhardi had little influence and did not represent official or military opinion, anyway. Still, very useful for Allied propagandists: this copy is from the 23rd impression. There is a little bit of airship action, though only in support of the army or navy.

Beyens. Germany Before the War. London, Edinburgh and New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1916. Also useful for Allied propagandists, though at least more wittingly this time. Conversely, as Belgian ambassador in Berlin at the time of the July crisis and the outbreak of the war it can hardly be denied that Beyens had a story worth telling.

Fiona Reid. Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914-30. London and New York, Continuum: 2010. What happened to shell-shocked soldiers after their war ended? We don't have much testimony from the men themselves; Reid draws mainly on the records of the Ex-services Welfare Society to reconstruct how they themselves tried to control their own fates in the midst of well-meaning and/or misguided pressure from the medical profession and from the public.

Eric Schlosser. Command and Control. London: Allen Lane, 2013. Somebody remarked that Schlosser's publicist should get a bonus, because this book has been everywhere, even in the news. Well, it's a fun topic: how close have we come since 1945 to the accidental detonation of nuclear weapons? (The answer is: very'.)

Craig Stockings and John Connor, eds. Before the Anzac Dawn: A Military History of Australia to 1915. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013. A great idea for an edited collection. There are essays on such topics as Indigenous warfare (Connor), Eureka (Gregory Blake), colonial navies (Greg Swinden), Australian involvement in wars in New Zealand (Damien Fenton), Sudan and South Africa (Craig Wilcox), invasion novels (Augustine Meaher IV), the capture of German New Guinea (Connor again), and more. Good stuff.

Thomas Hippler. Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884-1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. There are very few studies of Douhet in English, and none since Azar Gat's Fascist and Liberal Visions of War (1998), so I'm very excited to see this. Even leafing through it it's obvious that there is a lot of valuable stuff here: for example, on Douhet's surprisingly pacifistic views before 1914. It doesn't look like there is much on the question of the wider influence of Douhetism outside Italy, but I suspect it will be all the better for it.

David J. Hufford. The Terror that Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1982. This and the next two books fall outside of the subject matter of this blog: I bought them as methodological inspiration for the problem of how to approach people claiming to see things for which no objective evidence exists, vis-à-vis my ongoing mystery aircraft project. I actually devoted a whole blog post to this book without having actually read it, so it's about time I owned a copy.

Peter Lamont. Extraordinary Beliefs: A Historical Approach to a Psychological Problem. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. The 'psychological problem' here is essentially the same one I'm interested in: why do people believe extraordinary things? The 'historical approach' refers to Lamont's use of the history of spiritualism and psychic research to this end. It appears to trip lightly over the decades and centuries in a way I probably wouldn't be comfortable doing, but that's not always a bad thing.

Brian P. Levack. The Devil Within: Possession & Exorcism in the Christian West. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013. This is much more traditional history, unsurprisingly since it's written by a historian, not a folklorist or a psychologist. Levack argues that medical or psychological explanations for demonic possession cases are ahistorical, and that we should consider demoniacs as following a cultural script. How useful for me this is idea is, I'm not sure: where did the cultural script for seeing phantom airship come from, how did it arise so quickly? Something to think about.

Matthew S. Seligmann. The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1901-1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War Against Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Back to some air... er, seapower. Actually, this has some relevance for my recent interest in the naval dimensions of the 1913 phantom airship scare, as well as the knock-out blow theory. Also has a very useful discussion of archival sources, including some scathing comments about the Admiralty's archivists who decided to destroy 98% of ADM 1 in the 1950s and 1960s! Ouch.

Christy Campbell. Target London: Under Attack from the V-Weapons During WWII. London: Little, Brown, 2012. A popular (and in this case, cheap) account of the V-1 and V-2 campaigns with a nicely over-the-top cover illustration. As the title suggests, it does concentrate on London, but Antwerp's ordeal also receives some attention.

Hugh Dolan. Gallipoli Air War: The Unknown Story of the Fight for the Skies over Gallipoli. Sydney: Macmillan, 2013. On the one hand, it's good to see an Australian book about Gallipoli which isn't yet another Anzac story; and any book which cites Frederick Sykes (commander of the RNAS during the campaign) on the back cover and figures him prominently in the index gets bonus points from me. But if you're interested in Sykes you need to read Eric Ash's Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution (1999), but it's not cited here. And while it's clear from the bibliography that extensive archival research has been undertaken in both the UK and Australia, unfortunately there are no endnotes, which limits its scholarly usefulness.

John Keegan. The Face of Battle. London: Penguin, 1978. Don't tell anyone, but I've never read it.

Mark Mazower. Governing the World: The History of an Idea. London: Penguin, 2013. The subtitle is a bit misleading, I feel: except in the early part of the book which deals with the nineteenth century, it's not an intellectual history of world government proposals so much as a history of practical internationalism -- the Hague conferences, the League of Nations, and especially the United Nations and the proliferation of international bodies since 1945. Not that this isn't interesting or useful, but I'd like to know about the dreamers, too.

N. A. M. Rodger, ed. Naval Power in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. While obviously not intended to form a coherent approach to the topic, there's at least one chapter on most of the major navies. A couple of the chapters are particularly aviation-related: Michael Simpson's on airpower and seapower in the Mediterranean during the Second World War, and Eric Groves' on the Royal Navy's air-sea strategy east of Suez in the early 1960s. Something for everyone (for very small values of everyone).

John Horne, ed. A Companion to World War I. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. A collection of essays by an international group of experts who provide a comprehensive overview of the war: origins, strategy, combat, the home fronts, memory, and so on. In many cases the essays are written by exactly who you'd expect, and want. The chapter on the air war gives rise to mixed feelings, however. It's by John H. Morrow, Jr., the author of The Great War in the Air (1993), which twenty years after publication is a classic and still the best general survey available. So the obvious choice, then. Except that he's largely moved on from aviation history since the mid-1990s, and the citations in his chapter reflect this. So maybe not the obvious choice, then. Except that I'm struggling to think of many essential works on airpower in the First World War that he's missed out on. From my own narrow interests, probably only Biddle's Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare (2002), and maybe fellow contributor Susan Grayzel's At Home and Under Fire (2012), though only parts of these deal with 1914-1918. Maybe the real problem, then, is that not enough historians picked up where Morrow left off.

Colin Dobinson. Building Radar: Forging Britain's Early Warning Chain, 1935-1945. London: Methuen, 2010. Looks like a useful complement to David Zimmerman's Britain's Shield (2001). This covers the scientific and institutional side of the British development of radar in detail too (and adds some texture to the role of death ray desire), but is more concerned than is Zimmerman with the operational and technical side of the programme, as well as with the physical survival of radar sites (since the book is part of an English Heritage series).

Stuart Hylton. Reporting the Blitz: News from the Home Front Communities. Stroud: History Press, 2012. A thematic exploration of the non-London Blitz as seen through the provincial press: the black-out, evacuation, anti-gas drills, entertainment, war aims, and even air raids. Some chapters stray outside the Blitz, for example one on attitudes towards Britain's allies (mostly meaning the Soviet Union and the United States, though at least Canada gets a mention). Well-illustrated with relevant newspaper advertisements.

A. O. Pollard. Epic Deeds of the RAF. London and Melbourne: Hutchinson and Co., 1940. Pollard, a VC winner and former RAF pilot, was mostly known for his crime thrillers (some of them airminded) but occasionally turned his hand to non-fiction. This is a fairly generic account of the first year of the Second World War in the air; the last chapter takes the story up to 15 September 1940 and so Pollard is confident enough to declare victory in the Battle of Britain. The style is exactly what you'd expect from the title.

Robert Tombs and Emile Chabal, eds. Britain and France in Two World Wars: Truth, Myth and Memory. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. France is too often neglected in Anglocentric accounts of the world wars so it's good to have a bit of balance. An impressive list of contributors of the likes of Jay Winter, Elizabeth Greenhalgh and Gary Sheffield look at the military relationship between France and Britain as well as the ways they have remembered their shared experiences of warfare in the decades since 1945. However, it would have been interesting to have some chapters on the interwar period, given that the relationship soured so quickly after 1918, yet remained of critical importance to both countries as they both prepared for and tried to avoid fighting side by side again against Germany.

Christopher M. Bell. Churchill and Sea Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. I'm on record as pledging to never write a book about Winston Churchill, because there seems to be another new one out every time I go to a bookshop and very few of them can have anything new or even interesting to say about the man. And yet there are exceptions, and this is one of them: his involvement with, interest in and affection for the Royal Navy is well-known but little-studied. Churchill and Airpower, anyone?

Ritchie Calder. Carry on London. London: English Universities Press, 1941. Calder was a campaigning journalist during the Blitz, who exposed many of the official civil defence failures in the New Statesman. They feature here too, but overall he gives the government much credit for eventually getting its act together. Ends with a call for Britons never to lose the sense of purpose and unity gained through fighting the Blitz.

John Crawford and Ian McGibbon, eds. New Zealand's Great War: New Zealand, the Allies and the First World War. Titirangi: Exisle, 2007. Although this is the product of a conference, it manages to be a reasonably comprehensive guide to New Zealand's experience and memory of the First World War: Gallipoli, the Somme, home defence, religion, gender, the naval war, the air war (by the late Vincent Orange), and so on. A few ring-ins from overseas help supply context.

Negley Farson. Bomber's Moon. London: Victor Gollancz, 1941. Another contemporary account of the Blitz by a journalist (apparently, the thing to do when in New Zealand is to buy books about something that happened on almost the exact opposite side of the world). This one is by an American foreign correspondent and portrays the character of Londoners under fire. Almost worth it for Tom Purvis's sketches alone. Dedicated to 'The last Nazi'.

Victor Lefebure. The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War. New York: Chemical Foundation, 1923. An influential treatise on the use of chemical weapons during the First World War and the difficulties involved in making sure it never happened again. Lefebure was a company commander in the Special Brigade and then British liaison to the French on chemical warfare. I do wish I'd noticed it was the American edition though, especially since the text is available for free online.

Bob Maysmor. Te Manu Tukutuku: The Maori Kite. Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2001. Second edition. I was completely unaware of the Maori tradition of kite-flying so I couldn't not buy this. The Polynesians brought them with them in their migrations and so by the early second millennium they were being flown here in New Zealand. They mainly seem to have been used for divination and for fun. Lots of illustrations.