Giles MacDonogh. 1938: Hitler’s Gamble. London: Constable, 2010. 1938 was a big year for Germany, with the army purge, the Anschluss of Austria, the Sudeten crisis, and Kristallnacht. It seems that the fate of the Jews in Germany (including those parts absorbed in the course of 1938) is given a relatively large amount of attention […]
John Gooch. Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A big book for a big subject. There’s a lot here on strategic debates and policy within the Fascist regime; not just how the military served Italian foreign policy ends in Spain and Abyssinia but also
Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Who doesn’t need another book on the origins of the First World War? Not me! This particular one focuses on the Balkan quagmire and its role in Great Power politics. Unlike some other recent interpretations (such as William Mulligan’s), Clark
Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1942: In the Shadow of War (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013). A collection of essays originating in a Military History and Heritage Victoria conference held in Melbourne earlier this year, which I’m now regretting not having attended. There are contributions on the Australia-Japan relationship before the Second World War
Kevin M. O’Reilly. Flyers of Time: Pioneer Aviation in Country Victoria: The First Fifty Years, a Collection. Dingley Village: Kevin M. O’Reilly, 2012. Mainly a compendium of newspaper articles relating to Victorian aviation outside Melbourne, covering the period 1911-1960. Also lots of contemporary photographs of aeroplanes from various sources, a selection of aviation ephemera such
Neil Arnold. Shadows in the Sky: The Haunted Airways of Britain. Stroud: The History Press, 2012. A compilation of, mostly, strange things seen in the sky over Britain. Everything from dragons, fish, battles, and UFOs to, naturally, phantom airships (and ghost aircraft, as in actual ghosts). Lots of interesting details but not much in the
Robert Boyce. The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A big new (well, not so new by now) history of the way the Great Depression (or Slump) wrecked the international order, paving the way for Hitler and the rest of it. So it’s not just about
Mark Atherton. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. With The Hobbit published 75 years ago this very day and the (first of three!) movies coming out in a couple of months, this is very well-timed. The author is, like Tolkien, an Oxford
Some common themes here, more or less unintentional… Pam Oliver. Raids on Australia: 1942 and Japan’s Plans for Australia. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. The title is a bit misleading. Oliver examines Japanese activities in Australia, commercial, government, and individual, in the decades before 1942, as well as Australian government and popular suspicions of
David S. Bird. Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012. An Australian equivalent of Richard Griffiths’ Fellow Travellers of the Right, though this covers the Second World War period as well. The title isn’t an affectation: it seems that the Aboriginal idea of the dreamtime was appropriated by pro-Nazis
