Neil Hanson. First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918. London: Doubleday, 2008. This is a thick, new narrative history of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War, concentrating mainly on the aeroplane raids in 1917-8. Although written for a popular audience, it’s based on […]
Something which continues to surprise me (but probably shouldn’t, by now) is the way that people were evidently still worried, well into the Blitz, that Germany had not yet unleashed its full aerial might against Britain. That is, that despite victory in the Battle of Britain, and at least enduring the first few months of
I’ve written before about some of the discoveries one can make while wandering around the ERC Library at Melbourne. (Which used to be the ‘Education Resource Centre Library’ but, after the renovations are complete, will be backronymed into the ‘Eastern Resource Centre’.) I’m sure lots of university libraries have a section like this — at
Here are a couple of photos I used in my AHA talk last week: This is a Lufthansa Ju 52/3m, one of the great airliners of the 1930s, at Croydon aerodrome, ca. 1936. Other operators included Swissair, Aeroflot, and British Airways (an ancestor of the current airline of the same name).
Anthony Burke. Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Britain isn’t the only country to go into periodic panics about its vulnerability to invasion, after all. This book ostensibly begins in 1788, but looks like it mostly deals with the Cold War and after. Andrew J. Rotter. Hiroshima: The World’s
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The Research Quality Framework (RQF) was a proposal by the previous Australian federal government to introduce a set of metrics by which the research output of university departments can be measured. Something like the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain, certainly in principle (I don’t know enough about either to say
1908 was the year that aviation, and its possible consequences, burst into British consciousness. In July, the British press reported on a long-duration flight over Germany of the Zeppelin LZ4, which proved that controlled lighter than air flight was practical, and in August, on the flights in France of Wilbur Wright, which very publicly proved
Stephen Biddle. Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004. An analytical and numerical approach to working out which side should be victorious in battle. I see nothing in the index to suggest that there’s an answer to the classic dilemma: U.S.S Enterprise vs. a star destroyer,
What a difference two-thirds of a century makes. This photo was taken from the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral some time after the devastating air raid on the night of 29 December 1940, looking north-north-west. I think the street running diagonally from the lower-right hand corner is Paternoster Row, which had long been the centre
A while back I learned from Investigations of a Dog of TD Word Count, a WordPress plugin which totals up all the words published in a blog’s posts and pages. In just over three years of blogging, Airminded has racked up 250,664 words! To put that in perspective, the PhD I’ve been working on for
