Nick Smart. Neville Chamberlain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010. I’m not a big reader of biographies, partly because they often aren’t ‘historical’ enough and partly because they usually aren’t about the people I’m interested in. This one satisfies on both counts.
‘In the Next War’ was a short series of books published in Britain in 1938 and 1939, edited by Basil Liddell Hart. Unlike the earlier To-day and To-morrow books which attempted to predict things to come, these were much less eclectic and much more narrowly focused on future warfare: airpower; seapower; tanks, infantry and the
If anyone came close to creating a death ray weapon by the end of the Second World War, it was the Japanese army. It wouldn’t have helped them much, however, as they weren’t at war with rabbits. According to Richard Overy in The Air War 1939-1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]), 195: The lack of
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] ‘To-day and To-morrow’ was a series of over a hundred essays on ‘the future’ of a diverse range of subjects, which were published in pamphlet form by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. between 1924 and 1931. The authors are equally varied: some were acknowledged experts in their fields, others seem to
Just as when reading Brave New World I applied my airminded filters and extracted Aldous Huxley’s vision of future warfare, I’m going to do the same for that other great British dystopia, George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Which is what passes for summer reading for me. Quotes taken from this version.) War is much more important
I recently read Sonya O. Rose’s Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which is interesting on such subjects as anti-Semitism during the Blitz. But I kept being drawn back to the front cover, for a completely trivial reason. The illustration is from a 1941 poster
So we’ve seen American claims of a British secret air defence weapon in the Battle of Britain; American claims of British secret air defence weapons in the mid-1930s; and American ideas for superweapons to break the deadlock of the First World War. What do I mean suggest by these examples? Why have I called these
Peter J. Bowler. Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009. How and what the public learned about science was important in an age of technological warfare, and this has a decent number of entries in the index under ‘military applications of science’. Tom Buchanan.
Christopher Andrew. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Most valuable for me on the Edwardian spy mania, but looks like a fun read for the rest of the thousand-odd pages. R. V. Jones. Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945. London: Penguin, 2009 [1978]. A reprint of
Evelyn August. The Black-out Book: One-hundred-and-one Black-out Nights’ Entertainment. Oxford and New York: Osprey, 2009 [1939]. A facsimile reprint containing jokes, puzzles, games, trivia and other bits and pieces: giving a lower-brow (and I’m sure more accurate) impression of what people actually did in shelters than this. Evelyn August was the pseudonym of Sydney and
