I just tried out Bruce’s Australian Name Generator (well, it’s alun‘s, really). Being an actual Australian, I was expecting something special, and I got it: Brett Holman from this day forward you will also be known as: Airborne Bruce the Great Galah That’s almost uncanny.
Agatha Christie. Death in the Clouds. London: HarperCollins, 2001 [1935]. I am ashamed to admit it, but I have read very little British fiction from the early twentieth century, aside from thesis-related stuff and some science fiction. So I’m trying to remedy that, by reading characteristic and/or significant novels from my period. Christie’s Hercule Poirot
On this day in 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marsall Islands. Possibly not coincidentally, the October 2005 issue of History Today features an absorbing article by Geoffrey Best entitled “Winston Churchill, the H-Bomb and nuclear disarmament”. I have a quibble though … Best quotes a 1953
This story turned up on the urban legends website Snopes recently: Another enemy decoy, built in occupied Holland, let to a tale that has been told and retold every since by veteran Allied pilots. The German “airfield,” constructed with meticulous care, was made almost entirely of wood. There were wooden hangers, oil tanks, gun emplacements,
Peter Almond. 90 Years of the Air League: The Story of British Aviation. London: Air League, n.d. [1999]. This history of the Air LeagueThe major British aviation advocacy group, founded in 1909 as the Aerial League of the British Empire, then known as the Air League of the British Empire from 1918 until some time
Thanks to Chris Williams for pointing me in the direction of Patrick Wright’s article at openDemocracy about the Anti-Air War Memorial at Woodford Green, Essex. I hadn’t heard of this before. It was made by sculptor Eric Benfield in the form of a bomb falling through the air, and in June 1936 it was put
Chronomedia is a very nicely done chronology of developments in just about all forms of audio-visual mass media, covering a wide span but inevitably concentrating on Britain and America in the 20th century. Lots of interesting little tit-bits: the first film shot from an aircraft in flight was in September 1908; while in September 1939,
This logically should have gone into the previous post about archives, but I got carried away working out what that air mail poster was about! But I had intended to mention two online archives of British newsreels: British Pathe and Movietone (slogan: “It speaks for itself”). These are great. You can search the descriptions for
Aside from the whole shadow-of-the-bomber thing, I have an amateur (okay – more amateur, then) interest in the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Partly because of the obvious continuities and parallels with the area I’m studying, but also because I’m old enough to remember the last flowering of nuclear paranoia in the
