Errol W. Martyn. A Passion for Flight: New Zealand Aviation Before the Great War. Volume 1: Ideas, First Flight Attempts and the Aeronauts 1868-1909. Upper Riccarton: Volplane Press, 2012. I mostly bought this for the two pages on the 1909 phantom airship scare, but it also has plenty of fascinating material on early New Zealand airmindedness (of which there was not a little). In addition, there's a full discussion of the claims that Richard Pearse should be regarded as the first to achieve powered, controlled, heavier-than-air flight: Martyn, who is probably the leading expert on early aviation in New Zealand, thinks not.

John Bede Cusack. They Hosed Them Out. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2012 [1965]. An Australian war novel, originally published nearly half a century ago under the pseudonym John Beede, and republished a number of times since; this edition has been revised and edited by John Brokenmouth and includes a glossary, footnotes, appendices, and a memoir by Cusack's daughter. It's based on the author's wartime experiences as an air gunner in 2 Group, RAF Bomber Command. The title immediately evokes Randall Jarrell's poem 'The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner', but a more relevant comparison is Don Charlwood's No Moon Tonight. (Review copy.)

Charles Emmerson. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. Another case where a book seems an apposite purchase, given that it is about the year I'm currently researching. This one has generated a bit of buzz. It's certainly an interesting approach, providing snapshots of a couple of dozen major cities around the world (Melbourne gets half a chapter, paired with Winnipeg; London gets two chapters, framing the book). The danger is that 1914 will overshadow 1913, that dark foreboding will prevail throughout; but flipping through it seems the author has avoided this pitfall.

Richard Holmes. Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. London: William Collins, 2013. Though the term wasn't around then, airmindedness was about balloons for longer than it has been about aeroplanes. But it's relatively neglected historiographically, certainly in my library, so this will help fill that gap: everyone from Nadar to Babar the Elephant is here, and the last chapter is devoted to Andree's attempts to reach the North Pole by air.

Peter Bowler. Darwin Deleted: Imagining a World without Darwin. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2013. I figured I should put my money where my mouth is and at least buy this, and hopefully even read it. Bowler uses a counterfactual approach in an attempt to elucidate how important Darwin was to the development of Darwinism by taking him out of the picture. What I like about this is that it's not a narrative describing one particular possible alternate timeline, which is the default mode of writing counterfactual histories even when done by academic historians. Instead Bowler is deliberate and analytical all the way along, weighing the (real) evidence and explaining his conclusions. If counterfactual history has any value beyond simply pointing out that things might have been different, it's in something like this approach.

Siân Nicholas and Tom O'Malley, eds. Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media: Historical Perspectives. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Lots of good stuff about such things as Edwardian wireless, the enemy within, A Clockwork Orange, and fear in East German television, plus several more reflective/theoretical essays. Turns out that I follow two of the contributors on Twitter (@DavidjHendy and @JohnCarterWood), which is probably not a coincidence. If you're a writer, you really should be on Twitter.

S. C. M. Paine. The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Argues that the Sino-Japanese War, the Second World War, and the Chinese Civil War need to be understood together, as a long cascade of conflicts. It's certainly novel to see all these wars being given approximately equal space, when two of them are glossed over in most of the histories I tend to read and the third is somewhat dominant. The focus is much more political and strategic than operational, and Paine focuses on the prewar decades in China and Japan (and the Soviet Union) as much as on the actual wars themselves.

E. H. Carr. What is History? Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2008. Second edition. What indeed?

David Edgerton. England and the Aeroplane: Militarism, Modernity and Machines. London: Penguin, 2013. Second edition. England and the Aeroplane was first published in 1991 and is now a key text for understanding modern Britain's relationship with technology in general and aviation in particular (I see it was one of the first books I read during my PhD, and it's one I return to frequently). So a second edition is welcome. What's new? Apart from small revisions to the text there's the subtitle, the illustration captions and some of the illustrations, a reflective preface, and perhaps most valuable of all for those who already have the first edition, a ten page bibliographic essay on the relevant literature since 1990 (which cites my international air force article and refers readers to my 'magnificent blog' (200)! Ahem).

Catriona Pennell. A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Seeks to qualify the idea of war enthusiasm in Britain in 1914, and the lack thereof in Ireland, apparently resoundingly successfully. Uses letters and diaries as well as newspapers. The subject is of intrinsic interest but the methodology and sources will be valuable too. Zeppelins are discussed in several places, but sadly only real ones.

Michael C. Pugh. Liberal Internationalism: The Interwar Movement for Peace in Britain. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Again, the peace movement between the wars was more than just pacifism and it's surprising that there hasn't been a sustained look at British liberal internationalism before now. Has chapters on such things as disarmament, revisionism (aka appeasement) and education. One chapter, entitled 'Innovation', is devoted to the international air force idea, which gets it about right.

Richard Scully. British Images of Germany: Admiration, Antagonism & Ambivalence, 1860-1914. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Part of the reassessment of the Anglo-German relationship that has blossomed in the last decade or so (it's not just about Germanophobia any more), highlighting a new approach to the sources. For example, Scully argues that high literature needs to be studied in conjunction with low literature, rather than just one or the other in isolation. But he also draws extensively on visual sources such as maps and cartoons, with the second half of the book analysing the portrayal of Germany in Punch.

Alan G. V. Simmonds. Britain and World War One. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. The latest history of the British home front during the First World War (for some reason, the home front in the Second World War rarely seems to receive such comprehensive treatment). Politics, propaganda, production, prewar, postwar -- it's all here.

Peter Gray. The Leadership, Direction and Legitimacy of the RAF Bomber Offensive from Inception to 1945. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. An interesting title, and looks like an accurate one (if an annoyingly difficult one to shorten for citations!) Gray's background before doing his PhD (which this book is based upon) is in the RAF, where he was director of the Defence Leadership and Management Centre; so he certainly has useful experience to bring to the first two parts of the title. But it's probably his take on the legitimacy question that I'll most be interested to read. Well, that and the chapter on the intellectual context.

Robert Bollard. In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden History of Australia in World War I. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2013. Focuses on the Australian home front, in particular the growth of dissent which culminated in 1917 with the Great Strike and the second anti-conscription campaign. The final chapter looks at industrial and military unrest as peace returned. It does seem to more or less skip over 1918, which I noted in my 1918 article seems to be a common feature in the historiography. 1918 wasn't as eventful as 1917, certainly, but it deserves more attention than that. In other words I wish this book was longer!

James Hinton. The Mass Observers: A History, 1937-1949. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. This is not yet another book of extracts from Mass-Observation diaries (not that there's anything wrong with that) but a history of the organisation itself. Even within the chronological span covered, the focus is on the first five years (i.e. before Tom Harrisson was conscripted and so unable to exercise close control), but then that's when M-O was most active and influential. I only wish it could have been published, say, a year ago...

The Aero Manual: A Manual of Mechanically-propelled Human Flight, Covering the History of the Work of Early Investigators, and of the Pioneer Work of the Last Century. Recent Successes, and the Reasons Therefor, are Dealt With, Together with Many Constructive Details Concerning Airships, Aeroplanes, Gliders, etc. London: Temple Press, 1910. 2nd edition. Well, the title seems to cover the contents pretty well, but I'll add that it is illustrated throughout, and the 'constructive details' include, for example, pilots' notes for Voisins, Shorts and Farmans, and there is an unsigned article on 'Human flight from the military point of view'. Compiled by the staff of The Motor in April or May 1910, judging from a list of flights with a duration of an hour or longer at the back. Actually a facsimile edition published in 1972, which retains the original pagination and advertisements (e.g. Handley Page Ltd - 'The House for all things pertaining to aviation', including wire strainers at 6s. per dozen).