Yesterday (New Year’s Eve), the temperature here in Melbourne reached 41 degrees Celsius (that’s just under 106 Fahrenheit for those of you in the United States and Belize) — the hottest day of 2007, as it happens. The overnight minimum was 30 degrees (86 for those of you etc), which I think is higher than […]
Well, not just corpses … The data for the above plot are drawn from the War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War, 1914-1920 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1922), 674-7.1 It shows the total (i.e. civilian and military)2 casualties (i.e. killed and wounded) from all forms of
Did you know that 87% of the UK’s population, and 99% of its land area, lies outside Greater London? Well you’d barely know it from reading this blog. After finishing my research in that fair city (and after dispensing with the foolish notion of detouring to Cambridge or Aberystwyth to do yet more research), it
Basil Mathews. We Fight for the Future: The British Commonwealth and the World of To-morrow. London: Collins, 1940. Found this in a secondhand bookshop for $3. Even at that price I was a bit unsure about buying it — there seems to be some talk in it about setting up an international federal system after
In a previous post, I looked at some of Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions, made in 1946, about how rockets would change the types of weapons and vehicles used by military forces of the future.1 He got some hits (space stations) but, on balance, more misses (rocket mines, more turret fighters). In the latter half of
I spotted this ironic fusion of a peace symbol and a B-52 in the city1 earlier in the year, and luckily it was still there when I went back with a camera this week. That’s Melbourne, not London … [↩]
Is it possible to love a city? Surely. Is it premature to declare such a love after only having lived in that city for only two months? I don’t think so: after all, you can fall in love with a person practically on first sight. Love doesn’t depend upon your knowing its object deeply, only
Nearly a year ago, I wrote about a childhood hero of mine, on the tenth anniversary of his death. Today, I’m writing about another one, and it’s a happier occasion: it’s Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 90th birthday! Clarke has always been my favourite of the ‘big three’ post-war science fiction writers: he evokes a sense
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Recently, I read Alan Kramer’s Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. It’s an excellent book, both illuminating and informative (being airminded, I found the section on the Austrian and German bombing of Italy to be especially fascinating), and I highly recommend it.1 But there
The 9th Military History Carnival is up, over at the Official Osprey Publishing Blog. This month, the post I found the most interesting is at Citizen Historian, about the part played by the Malayan Regiment in the Battle of Pasir Panjang, 13 February 1942. I certainly didn’t know that Malayans had been involved; it changes
