[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account […]
A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The
I was invited this week to take part in a ’round table’ discussion between Major Paul Moga (USAF), Professor James Arthur Mowbray (Air War College), and selected bloggers with an interest in aviation (including Scott Palmer of the Avia-Corner). I’m not sure the producers realised that I’m down under, but although the scheduled time for
Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) has been working on a new film, called Australia. As the name perhaps suggests, it’s a sweeping saga of this wide, brown land of ours: the men who conquered it, the women who loved them, the cattle, the dust, the flies … well, it sounds pretty dull to
THE RAIDERS. A FLIGHT OF SEAPLANES SETTING OFF FOR A NIGHT BOMBING RAID. This one’s got me stumped. It shows a flight of RNAS twin-engined seaplane bombers, but I haven’t been able to find anything with the same profile. Any ideas? Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls
Keith Lowe. Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943. London: Penguin Books, 2007. A chunky account of Operation Gomorrah in July 1943. Looks thorough: a good bibliography, in both English and German. But surely there are better descriptions of Sir Malcolm Campbell than ‘military theorist’ (p. 52)!
Via Old is the New New, MONIAC, the MOnetary National Income Automatic Computer: an analogue hydraulic computer designed by A. W. Phillips, a New Zealander, while a student at the LSE in 1949. The prototype was apparently built out of spare Lancaster parts. And there’s one on display at the University of Melbourne, otherwise known
A few weeks ago, I wrote about American fears in 1942 that German spies were making patterns in fields, as signals to the location of nearby targets of military significance. At the time, I had this feeling that I’d come across something very similar, but couldn’t quite place it. Now I’ve worked out what it
On the night of 16 February 1873, the Russian ironclad Kaskowiski slipped into Waitemata Harbour, off Auckland, the largest city in the British colony of New Zealand. She found a British warship at anchor, and sent a ‘submarine pinnace’ to disable its crew by means of a ‘mephitic water-gas’ so that their ship could be
From the Manchester Guardian, 29 September 1938, p. 6: We are hearing and reading so much (writes a correspondent) of people talking in the streets, in public vehicles, and wherever they meet about the international situation that perhaps “Miscellany” may care to preserve for posterity this perfectly true and unvarnished record of a conversation overheard
