Roger Beaumont. Might Backed by Right: The International Air Force Concept. Westport and London: Praeger, 2001. Some library gap-filling: it’s the only book on the history of the international air force idea there is, so I ought to have it. Doesn’t devote enough attention to the 1920s and 1930s for my liking, but for once […]
Ian Castle. London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace. Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008. Ian Castle. London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Kate Moore. The Battle of Britain. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Gavin Mortimer. The Blitz: An Illustrated History. Oxford and Long Island City:
James Hamilton-Paterson. Empire of the Clouds: When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. ‘When’ is the decade or two after 1945. Apparently not quite as triumphalist as the subtitle would suggest. Has a rather Commando cover featuring a Vulcan. Looks like fun. Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War.
A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. A collection of essays on pretty much what it says on the tin. A slight majority of contributions are on aspects of memory of the war rather than the war itself, including two by bloggers
I’ve recently been reading Peter Ewer’s Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia’s Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I’d thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up
Someone on the WWI-L mailing list posted a link to a scanned book with the rather excellent title Photographs of H.M. Vessels & Auxiliaries and Other Objects Taken from the Air. This was printed in August 1918 for the Intelligence Department of the Admiralty as CB 848 and was very clearly marked secret, issued in
Daniel Swift. Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. This book is a very different way to approach the Allied bomber offensives of the Second World War. It is not a history of strategic bombing policy, nor is it a history of the machines used to carry it out,
Philip Towle. Going to War: British Debates from Wilberforce to Blair. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A short and occasionally polemic book which covers a lot of ground. First looks at how different sections of society have dealt with the question of war — including novelists such as H. G. Wells and Nevil
Justin E. A. Busch. The Utopian Vision of H. G. Wells. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, 2009. Not sure about this one. There’s no doubt that Wells had a utopian vision, several of them in fact, but the index has about three dozen references for Plato as well as fifteen or so for F.
Patrick Deer. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Argues that Britain developed a ‘war culture’ in the Second World War which was very different to that of the First and which ‘colonised’ the national consciousness in the rest of the century. It’s from a
