S. P. MacKenzie. The Battle of Britain on Screen: ‘The Few’ in British Film and Television Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. A short but densely-packed book, a series of cases studies of key representations of the Battle: The Lion Has Wings, The First of the Few, Angels One Five, Reach for the Sky, Battle […]
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
Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that I stand
Jeffry Record. The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006. Generally speaking, I’m bored by the ritual invocation of Munich every time some foreign crisis dominates the headlines. But it’s not going to stop happening just because it bores me and it’s kinda my area (or adjacent to
It seems like forever since the last one, but it’s only been two months. The (16th) Military History Carnival has been posted at the Osprey Blog. A few present-day items seem to have snuck in, but there’s still plenty of history in there. My selection this time is about Burlington, at Underground, a rather beautiful
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] I’m often surprised by the books that historians haven’t written. The years I am researching are between two and three generations distant, yet it’s not hard to find (what seem to me to be) big, important topics which deserve to have academic monographs devoted to them, but have somehow been
A few months ago I looked at some visions of how aerial warfare might improve the city by blowing away ugly developments. Here’s a similar fantasy of better planning through bombing, though the site in question is a rather surprising one: Stonehenge. From Clough Williams-Ellis’s diatribe against the debeautification of the countryside, England and the
The short answer is, almost certainly not, but more of that in a moment. One of the nice things about blogging is that people send me emails on topics which they think may interest me. Recently I received scans of a photograph from Peter Edwards, who has the original glass plates. They’re from a box
Recently I’ve come across a number of really good websites about the Blitz. Oddly, none of them are about London, but instead are about the experience of some of Britain’s other blitzed cities. Maybe London is just too big a subject, and the smaller scale of the regional blitzes is more congenial to thorough exploration.
This week is the 25th anniversary of the Australian cinematic release of WarGames, which is mainly significant because I missed the anniversary of the US release a few weeks ago! There were a few retrospectives floating about then, which focused on the movie’s importance as an early popularisation of the hacking and phreaking subcultures, and
