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.
With my book’s publication imminent and my return to the job market beginning to, if not loom, then at least creep up, it’s time to think about what’s next in terms of a research programme. I had been thinking of something to do with mystery aircraft, and indeed my next small research project, on scares
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
My book is now finished: the cover has been finalised, the proofs are complete, the index is done, the files have been sent to the printers. Publication is now only a month away. Ashgate has put up some teasers on its website: the table of contents, the introduction, and the index. I found my first
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
Michele Haapamaki. The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Inter-war Britain. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Michele may be better known to some of you as the Idle Historian, at her blog or on Twitter. She’s also now a published author, and I’ve been looking
A number of people suggested that the bleedthrough apparent in my book’s cover art could be removed easily enough, and so I went back and asked Ashgate if it could be fixed. And it can and it has been and here is the result. Perfect!
Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead and Alison J. Williams, eds. From Above: War, Violence and Verticality. London: Hurst & Company, 2013. A collection of essays on the aerial view and how it has changed war. While there is a lot of historical detail in here, most of the contributors to this volume are geographers, rather than
My book, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941, is getting closer to being real. In June, in just three months, it will be in the bookstores. Soon the indexing will be undertaken. Yesterday I made the final corrections to the text, and shortly I’ll receive the page proofs from
Ron Gretton, Geoff Matthews and James Kightly. Bristol Boxkites at Point Cook: Commemorating the Centenary of Australian Military Aviation 1914-2014. Werribee: Project 2014, 2014. In 1995 a group of volunteers decided to build a flying replica of the first Australian military aircraft, a Bristol Boxkite. It first flew late last year, and flew again at
