I went on a mini-spending spree this week — mini because Vintage have recently cut their prices in Australia and are cheap as chips. Graham Greene. Brighton Rock. London: Vintage Books, 2004 [1938]. ‘Now a major motion picture’. Aldous Huxley. Ape and Essence. London: Vintage Books, 2005 [1949]. I couldn’t resist this after reading the […]
In Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Patrick Deer discusses airminded fiction for boys from the 1930s and suggests that (78): In their own cheery way, these boys’ flying stories echo the mythos of the flying übermenschen so dear to the fascist imagination. In their patriotic exuberance,
Juliet Gardiner. The Blitz: The British Under Attack. London: HarperPress, 2010. Another example of anniversary publishing, but I wouldn’t have misgivings about buying a Juliet Gardiner book. Except… I worry that it will cover too much of the same ground as her Wartime. Robin Higham and Frederick W. Kagan, eds. The Military History of the
Kate Moore. The Battle of Britain. London and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Gavin Mortimer. The Blitz: An Illustrated History. London and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. 2010 was seventy years after 1940, and in the usual way saw the publication of a number of new books about the pivotal events of that
Peter Hennessy. The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010. London: Penguin, 2010. Second edition. The instant classic on how the British government has gone about defending the realm, particularly in preparations for the Third World War. Hennessy has updated it with information from masses of newly declassified files from the Cold War, and has
Xmas wins! Gus Officer. Six O’Clock Diamond: The Story of a Desert Harrasser. Northcote: Woolhouse Press, 2008. The memoir of a Second World War RAAF Kittyhawk pilot, who in 1942 was shot down over the Western Desert and spent the rest of the war as a POW. Roland Perry. The Australian Light Horse: The Magnificent
Ian Castle. London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace. Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008. Illustrated by Christa Hook. Ian Castle. London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Illustrated by Christa Hook. As the titles suggest, these two entries in Osprey’s long-running Campaign series dovetail nicely. One takes as its
Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle)
J. M. Spaight. Volcano Island. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943. Although Spaight is one of my guys, I didn’t know from the title alone if it was even about aviation. Turns out that it is; here’s the blurb from the front dustjacket: IN 1939, our Island was peaceful and innocuous; now in 1943, with its volcanic
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Earlier this year I was tutor for a subject which explored the idea of genre, using books, films and plays about war for this purpose. One of the texts we read was Primo Levi’s account of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man.1 One of the sections I found most
