Peter Neville. Hitler and Appeasement: The British Attempt to Prevent the Second World War. London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2006. Takes the pro-appeasement side of the argument. Particularly good on diplomacy and personalities.
At In the Middle, Karl Steel reviews Adriana Cavarero’s book Horrorism, which, as I understand it, seeks to reorient descriptions of violence from the perspective of its perpetrators to that of its victims. This part of the review seems like a good question to ask here: I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes:
Pierre-Antoine Courouble. The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs. Toulon: Les Presses du Midi, 2009. One of my early posts on this blog was about a story which goes something like the following. The Germans are constructing a fake airfield to decoy Allied bombers, with dummy aircraft made out of wood. On the day it is
Pierre-Antoine Courouble. The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs. Toulon: Les Presses du Midi, 2009. A remarkably thorough attempt to run the wooden bomb stories to ground. Note: review copy.
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Or, Australia strides onto the world stage. Today is the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Versailles Treaty and thus of the Covenant of the League of Nations (which formed the first thirty articles of the Treaty). This was a fateful moment, with heavy consequences for those who lived through the
Sarah Caro. How to Publish Your PhD. London: SAGE Publications, 2009. Might come in handy one day. P. D. Smith. Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon. London: Penguin, 2008. Nice to see I’m not the only one with such dreams. NB: the author has a blog which often contains
Kate Darian-Smith. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime: 1939-1945. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2009. 2nd edition. Actually, I bought this last week but I don’t suppose anybody cares but me! An excellent survey of life in wartime Melbourne — the phoney war period, the fear of invasion and bombing in early 1942, the arrival
I’ve said before that Giulio Douhet’s influence on British ideas about airpower has been greatly overestimated. Nobody was talking about him before the mid-1930s, by which time the knock-out blow paradigm was firmly established. Much the same could be said of Billy Mitchell (although the sinking of the Ostfriesland was certainly noticed, and at least
Here are a couple of interesting but spurious claims about new weapons from 1939, which I’ve come across in my recent reading. The first is from the Melbourne Argus of 19 January 1939. It’s very brief, no more than a simple statement that the Soviet Union has announced that it has developed a death ray.
Richard Overy. The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars London: Allen Lane, 2009. One I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on! It’s not a general history of the 1920s and 1930s, but more a history of ideas, with a particular focus on (as the title suggests) pessimistic ones. There are a couple of
