When you are writing a thesis, nearly everything starts to look relevant to your topic. Unfortunately, that’s the case with the unfolding tragedy in New Orleans. Although it was a natural disaster, not man-made, and involved wind and water, not fire and gas, what Katrina did to New Orleans is something very like what the […]
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 couple of extremely informative websites I’ve just come across: Airshipsonline, home of the Airship Heritage Trust, dealing with most British airships since 1900 (wot, no Willows airships?); and Imperial Airways, home of the HP 42 project, which aims to build a flying replica of the British Handley Page 42 “Hannibal” biplane airliner of the
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
Germany was much closer to us physically, so that their [air] menace though not close to us in time was closer to our hearts. Sir John Simon, in CAB 16/110 (17 May 1934); quoted in Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932-1939 (London: Royal Historical Society,
This is very tangentially relevant to my topic: it has been found that anthrax samples given to Iraq by the US in the 1980s can be traced back to a cow which died in Oxfordshire in 1937. British scientists weaponised anthrax taken from this cow for their biological warfare tests during the Second World War
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
Today I officially began my candidature … I’m a PhD student! It must be nearly eight years since I was last a postgraduate research student (a masters degree in astrophysics). Oy vey.
I haven’t yet been to the UK National Archives (well, I haven’t been to the UK at all yet …) but I probably will at some point for the PhD, and I have ordered documents from them before. So it’s more than a little disturbing to learn via Schneier on Security via Patahistory that forged
