I have a new publication out — at least, it’s out electronically, I haven’t seen a physical copy yet! It’s a chapter in a collection published by Melbourne University Press and edited by Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava, Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology. My chapter is entitled ‘The enemy […]
The Guardian has published a very interesting piece by Owen Hatherley on the ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ phenomenon, an extract from his new book, The Ministry of Nostalgia: Consuming Austerity. He persuasively locates the poster within the context of an ‘austerity nostalgia […] a yearning for the kind of public modernism that, rightly or
Jeremy Black. The Cold War: A Military History. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. I already have a book with this title (by David Miller) but that was published in 1999, and another half-generation’s distant might lend some valuable perspective. The indefatigable Black traces the Cold War all the way back to 1917, perhaps
Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1944-45: Victory in the Pacific. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Having devoured Australia 1942 and Australia 1943, I was disappointed when Australia 1944 didn’t appear. This explains why! As with the previous volumes, this is an Australian perspective on the war, although there is a chapter on the Japanese
In the middle of January 1915, days before the first, fairly ineffectual Zeppelin raids on Norfolk, the novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes visited some relations of Reginald McKenna, the Home Secretary. There she was told that Mr. Gatty [a London historian] had heard from the Duke of Westminster that Winston Churchill says he expects a fleet
Ian Castle. The First Blitz: Bombing London in the First World War. Oxford and New York: Osprey, 2015. As seen on the Internet! I already own the two books which this combines. But they were review copies so I didn’t pay for them; it seems fair enough to support the author more concretely this time.
In the last decade or so, it seems to have become a thing to refer to the German air raids on Britain during the First World War as the ‘First Blitz’. There are now at least three books on the topic with that title or variations thereof: Andrew Hyde’s The First Blitz: The German Bomber
The novelist William Le Queux is famous, or rather infamous, for beating the drum of the German invasion and spy threat before the Great War. But what did he do during the war? Unsurprisingly, he did much the same thing. On 28 February 1915, for example, The People published an article by Le Queux entitled
This could be the lurid cover of an Edwardian novel about the dangers of aerial bombardment, with an aeroplane, an airship and Death himself hovering over a great city, watching the terrified populace streaming outwards in panic: the first knock-out blow from the air. But it’s not. Instead it’s the lurid cover of an Edwardian
This photograph purportedly shows a squadron of Italian Savoia-Marchetti S.55X flying boats over the Alps on 1 July 1933, during the second and last of the long-distance formation flights led by the Fascist air minister, Italo Balbo (hence ‘balbo‘, briefly in vogue to describe a large formation of aircraft), Rome to Chicago and back. These
