Not a lot of news today — at least, not a lot of new news. As the above headlines from The Times, p. 10, show, the meetings which were announced on Monday and which took place on Tuesday have, er, taken place, but no public statements have been made about what transpired in them, other […]
There is some hopeful news today, resulting from the flurry of activity of yesterday. From The Times, p. 10: It became known in London late last night that, as the result of Lord Runciman’s intervention, Dr. Benesh, the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, will receive to-day Herr Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans. It
The Sudeten crisis (or Czech crisis, or Czech-German crisis as it is called here) wasn’t front-page news in the Manchester Guardian on 29 August — it was on page 9. But that was actually where most newspapers put the most important news. Compared with those of today, British newspapers of the 1930s and before seem
Tomorrow I’m starting a bit of an experiment, an idea I had after doing a post on Human Smoke a few months back. We’re coming up on the 70th anniversary of the Sudeten crisis, which, as I noted recently, was a crisis long before Munich had anything to do with it. Long before. The Munich
Recently, the National Library of Australia opened up Australian Newspapers Beta to the public, free of charge (though whether free as in speech or free as in beer is unclear). This is part of the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program and promises to be a fantastic resource. They are digitising newspapers from every state from 1803
… to a wider audience! A few weeks back, I received an email from Robert Dudney, editor in chief of Air Force Magazine (published by the Air Force Association — that’s US Air Force, not Royal) seeking permission to reprint the text of Stanley Baldwin’s ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech, which I’d posted
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The Research Quality Framework (RQF) was a proposal by the previous Australian federal government to introduce a set of metrics by which the research output of university departments can be measured. Something like the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain, certainly in principle (I don’t know enough about either to say
1908 was the year that aviation, and its possible consequences, burst into British consciousness. In July, the British press reported on a long-duration flight over Germany of the Zeppelin LZ4, which proved that controlled lighter than air flight was practical, and in August, on the flights in France of Wilbur Wright, which very publicly proved
Everybody loves flying aircraft carriers — well, I do, anyway! Above is the closest the British got to the concept. In October 1926, the R33 (above) was used to carry and launch two Gloster Grebe fighters (below). These were relatively heavy aircraft, weighing over a ton each; earlier experiments had used only a single, lighter
Sometimes I wonder how I’d react if I was perusing an early-twentieth century newspaper and came across a URL in an advertisement. Maybe http://www.aerialgymnkhana.co.uk or http://www.hobadl.org.uk. I mean, there’s no physical reason why this couldn’t happen — all those characters existed back then. It’s just that arranging them in such a way would have made
