On my way back from the RAF Museum, I paused to take some pictures of the beautiful neoclassical St Pancras Parish Church, completed in 1822. They don’t really do it justice, but I do like this one, of one of the caryatids guarding the entrance to the crypt. The caryatids were modelled on those on […]
On my first Saturday here, I spent the morning printing out pages from the Daily Mail at British Library Newspapers in Colindale, and then headed over to the nearby RAF Museum London for an afternoon wandering around the historic aircraft. The problem with this is that it meant I had to carry with me (a)
The degree to which science fiction accurately predicts the future is not really the point; its value is more as an exploration of what people might do and what society might look like if you change things in a few fundamental ways. (And for my purposes, it’s the assumptions underlying a given exploration which are
It’s Lord Baden-Powell, Chief Scout, who at one stage in the 1930s seems to have had a regular spot in the Daily Mail’s “Boys & Girls” section, teaching the future imperial overlords all about their wonderful Empire. In the 18 March 1938 issue, he contributed a piece called “Policeman aeroplanes”, along with the following rather
Last week, in an effort to get over the jetlag I went to Leicester Square to see a movie. Since I had some time to kill before the movie started, and because Leicester Square itself is pretty ordinary, I went for a wander. I still have only a basic grasp of London geography, so I
Actually, that should be “The lodgings of the compiler of the damned”, but it’s more dramatic this way. 39 Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, WC1, just a few blocks from my own lodgings. The word “unprepossessing” could have been coined in honour of this building,1 and there are certainly many far more pleasing buildings too look at
Here are a few of the best pictures from my first trip to the British Museum, almost a week ago already. How time flies when you’re stuck in the archives! Marble statue of youth, possibly Caligula, early 1st century AD. If it is Caligula, then the horse is presumably Sir Thomas Inskip.
Hello everybody, I seem to have got here at last, it’s been a long long time but here I am and jolly glad I am to be here at last (to quote Amy Johnson). I’ve been in Blighty for almost 24 hours at this point; here are some random thoughts and observations. Of course these
For the first time in nearly two years, the number of books I have out from the uni library has dropped to zero. Which can mean only one thing: I’m about to fly out to the UK! There will be a blogging hiatus but it’s not likely to be more than a few days, if
The big trip to the UK looms. It’s my first and I’m greatly looking forward to it — all the more so because I have long been fascinated by the place and its history. Although I can’t say it was always my plan to do a PhD in British military aviation history, looking back, there
