[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] This is the front cover of a book by J. M. Spaight on British airpower, called The Sky’s the Limit. It was published in 1940, a not-insignificant year for the RAF. In fact, this ‘New and up-to-date’ edition was published in August, right in the middle of the Battle of […]
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Photographs of actual combat in the First World War are exceedingly rare, in the air as well as on the ground. Both of these are purportedly of Zeppelins flying over Britain. Are they fake or not? My answers are below. `The low down thing that plays the low down game’.
My laptop is my primary workhorse, and I’ve just upgraded — a very exciting time in any computer geek’s life! On the left, my old 12″ 1.0 Ghz G4 Powerbook, “zeppelin”; on the right, my new 13″ 2.0 GHz Core Duo MacBook, “hendon”. Zeppelin has been a rock-solid little machine for me these last couple
[I posted this last Wednesday, but somehow, it was marked as “private” rather than “published”, so nobody saw it but me! So I’m fixing that and bumping it to the top.] The talk went off pretty well, I think — at least I didn’t hear any snoring and got some good questions at the end.
This is my reading list for the next month or so, all from the period 1932-1941. After that, I’ll be back at the State Library to read some more. There’s about twice as many books as there were for the preceding period (1917-1931), though not all of these will turn out to be of great
Football, by which I mean Australian Rules, pretty much bores me to tears. Given that I live in the home of Aussie rules, it’s something that I just have to put up with. Melbourne is obsessed with the sport for more than half the year, between the start of the pre-game season in February and
I spent most of the last week at the State Library of Victoria. It’s a grand old pile, built in the 1850s when Melbourne was awash with gold money (apparently, it was one of the richest cities in the British Empire). For the last decade or so, it has been undergoing works of some kind
The Royal Navy is about to pay a high price for its neglect of airpower … Front cover of E. F. Spanner, The Broken Trident (London: E. F. Spanner, 1929). I just like this picture for some reason. Spanner was a retired naval architect who evidently had at least one bee in his bonnet, for
Well, OK, the Commonwealth Games then. British Empire Games was the original name: the first were held in 1930 in Hamilton, Canada. Most of the world probably has not heard of the Commonwealth Games, but it’s second only to the Olympics (which it closely resembles) in terms of bringing the greatest number of elite athletes
In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of actionNo more than half the maximum
