I noticed that I had a few inches of spare shelf space last week, so … Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper. The Aeroplane in War. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1912. A big survey of military aviation before the First World War – keeping the reading public informed about such innovations as the ‘engine-in-front biplane’. Grahame-White […]
In a previous post I wondered whether the authors of the 1934 knock-out blow novel Invasion from the Air, Frank McIlraith and Roy Connolly, might have been left-wing, as the artist who (apparently) was supposed to illustrate the book was a communist. I hadn’t been able to turn up any biographical information about either of
Rudyard Kipling, that poet of empire, also wrote two very airminded science fiction stories: “With the night mail” (1905) and a sequel, “As easy as A.B.C.” (1912). Both were set in the then-remote 21st century, and revolved around the Aerial Board of Control – the ABC of the second story’s title. This is effectively a
Stephen Bungay. The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain. London: Aurum Press, 2000. Recent-ish and apparently revisionist.
Tate Online has a series of wonderfully melancholy lithographs by James Boswell, showing a collapse in law and order in London – mobs in the streets, bodies hanging from lampposts, looters in museums and so on. Collectively entitled The Fall of London, they were drawn in 1933 and it is suggested that they were intended
W.E. Johns. Biggles and the Black Peril. London: Red Fox, 2004 [1935]. I felt a bit silly standing in the children’s section of the bookshop looking through all their Biggles books, but I guess I could have pretended I was buying it for a nephew or something …
Like about half the historioblogosphere,If Google is any guide, that word is original to me. I’m not proud of this. I’ve been playing with LibraryThing (where I am airminded, naturally enough). Well, more than playing – I’ve added just about all my books (even the dodgy pseudoscience and pseudohistory ones – I’m a paid-up skeptic,
Basil Collier. Heavenly Adventurer: Sefton Brancker and the Dawn of British Aviation. London: Secker & Warburg, 1959. A big wheel in the RFC, for most of the 1920s he was in charge of civil aviation at the Air Ministry. He was killed in the R101 disaster in 1930. Peter Lewis. The British Fighter Since 1912:
Oh yes he does. Actually this is from a great site, www.biggles.info, which has the front covers and illustrations from all 98 (!) Biggles books, along with plot summaries if you can’t be bothered reading them all. (The covers are on the main page.) The main site, www.wejohns.com, gives the same treatment to all the
Geoffrey Best. Churchill and War. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005. As previously noted. There’s disappointingly little on Churchill’s “wilderness years” – OK, so there wasn’t actually a war on then, but this was the time when the foundations of the Churchill-as-prophet-of-war legend were laid. And it’s the period of his career that
