Richard Griffiths. Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. I love this book. So I bought it. A brilliantly readable study of who liked the Nazis and why, including a few pages specifically on ‘the world of aviation’ (137-41). Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Michael […]
Harold Nicolson. Public Faces: A Novel. London: Constable, 1932. A fantasy by the well-known diplomat, politician and diarist (and husband of Vita Sackville-West) about what might happen in 1939 if his political friends were in power, and the storm clouds of war gathering again. I’m not quite sure if it technically counts as an air
David Butler and Gareth Butler. Twentieth-Century British Political Facts, 1900-2000. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Eighth edition. The bible. Well, a bible, anyway. Zara Steiner. The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. If this is up to the standards of her Britain and the Origins of the First World War,
John Robert Ferris. Men, Money, and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919-1926. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. A key reference on a somewhat neglected period. Boris Ford, ed. The Cambridge Cultural History. Volume 8: Early 20th Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Because I need more culture! Peter Lewis. The British
Uri Bialer. The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932-1939. London: Royal Historical Society, 1980. A brief book but an important one: as far as I am aware, it is the only one to specifically focus on the fear of air attack, as opposed to air policy generally. Bialer
A new First World War blog has appeared, Trench Fever. It’s by Dan Todman, a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. It promises to be very meaty! He also has a new book out called The First World War: Myth and Memory, which looks like one I should read. Well – don’t they all?
Robert Wohl. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005. The long awaited (by me, at least) sequel to A Passion for Wings, this looks to be equally wide-ranging and is just as gloriously illustrated. There’s a chapter on aerial bombing, though it seems to have little on
David Edgerton. England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991. This is a very short book, only some 108 pages long – as the subtitle says, an essay rather a fully researched monograph. The overall point of the book is to argue that
I will shortly put up the first of an occasional series of notes on books I’m reading in the course of my studies. They won’t be fully-fledged critical reviews, more just a brief description and some thoughts and impressions of how the book relates to my own particular interests. I’ll only write about those I
But of course it shouldn’t have to. It was a pointless and tragic waste of human life. References to London’s stoicism during the Blitz are all over the place: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Australian Labor Party foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd (“British bulldog spirit” was how he phrased it on the radio
