So I’m writing a book. Why? There are already many histories of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War: in my proposal, I listed eleven published since the 1980s alone, and even that is hardly exhaustive. Many of these are excellent — Ian Castle’s books, in particular, are required reading on […]
I am delighted to announce that I have signed an advance contract with Cambridge University Press((Founded in 1534. Just sayin’…)) to publish my next book, currently entitled Home Fires Burning: Emotion, Spectacle, and Britain’s First War from the Air, in their Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series. Here’s a one
The time has finally come to address the claim I’ve made in the title of this series of posts, that the air raid somehow vanished. Why did I say that, and what does it mean? Well, look at the plot above. Previously I looked at how often ‘air raid’ (and related phrases) appeared per issue
The previous post ended with this photo, and another very similar one, which Getty Images dates to 17 October 1917 with the caption ‘Moses Shackman, centre, with members of the Jewish East End Shelter Corps. Their hats are labelled in Yiddish and English’: As I noted, the hatbands actually say (in English, at least), ‘RAID
From Alan Allport’s excellent new book, Britain at Bay 1938-1941, a couple of sentences about the IRA’s 1939 bombing campaign which were guaranteed to catch my attention as imaginary air raids: Some witnesses to the Broadgate bombing interviewed by the police were convinced that they had seen aircraft in the sky moments before the explosion,
I’ve got a chapter entitled ‘Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain’ in a new Palgrave Macmillan collection just out, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, edited by Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber. Here’s the abstract: This chapter argues that aerial theatre, in the form of annual
Last year I tried to run to ground the phrase ‘England is no longer an island’, usually said to be uttered by Lord Northcliffe in 1906 after hearing of an early Santos-Dumont flight.1 But the earliest source I could find which claimed that Northcliffe said it dated to 1922, it only became common in an
In May 1911, two policemen were sent out from Yamba, a logging town at the mouth of the Clarence River in northern New South Wales, to investigate something odd which had been found on ‘top of a sandhill near Ryan’s waterhole, about six miles [away] and about 400 yards in from the beach’: a rudely-constructed
Alexander Rose. Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World. New York: Random House, 2020. The two men of the title both led a great aviation enterprise. Both dreamed of spanning the world with their passenger aircraft. Both struggled at times, and prospered at others. But one was
Kim Wagner pointed out an article in Providence (‘A journal of Christianity & American foreign policy’) by Nigel Biggar, entitled ‘Thank God for the Royal Air Force!’. Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Oxford University, has attained some notoriety for his ‘Ethics and Empire’ research project, which seeks to trawl the history
