I ordered these months before I left for London; of course they only turned up a couple of weeks after I left! Basil Collier. The Defence of the United Kingdom. Uckfield: Naval and Military Press, 2004 [1957]. The volume of the official British history of the Second World War dealing primarily with air defence, but […]
Military History Carnival #6 is up at Armchair General. The stand-out post this month is a rebuttal of the alleged decline in military history at American universities, undertaken by David Stone at The Russian Front (which is an ambitious — and very stylish! — new group blog on Russian military and diplomatic history, the editor-in-chief
Songs of Australia: the landscape, the country and the city. Icehouse, “Great Southern Land”. Standing at the limit of an endless ocean Stranded like a runaway, lost at sea City on a rainy day down in the harbour Watching as the grey clouds shadow the bay
Actually, that should read “ReturnED on a jet plane” as I’m finally back in good old Melbourne-town again, but I find it hard to resist symmetry. (Anyway, I started to write this post at Heathrow waiting for my Qantas flight home, but my laptop crashed twice so I decided that it wasn’t meant to be
I’m currently at Hexham in Northumberland, where I’ve been busy touring some of the Hadrian’s Wall sites: Chesters (yesterday), Vindolanda and Housesteads (today). All of which were utterly memorable, and a write-up will eventually be forthcoming; but it was only at Vindolanda that I was buzzed by a very low- and very fast-flying Tornado! It
So, after just under two months in London, it’s time to leave. Tomorrow morning I’m on the train1 to York, then after that, Hexham (near Hadrian’s Wall), Edinburgh, Rome2 before finally getting back to good old Melbourne-town on 18 September. It should be a great way to cap off what has already been a fantastic
Yet another British war game to add to the pile, this one from 1922: The Raider. A copy of a new game called “The Raider” has been received from Enstone and Lilienfeld, of 47, Berners Street, W.1. The game consists of a large sheet divided into squares, the whole showing a view of a battle-front
Of course. I cancel a planned1 trip to Hamburg for a conference in order to extend my stay in London by 4 days, so I can hit a few more archives and libraries that I really wanted to look at. And what happens? A 3-day tube strike, which started this afternoon and finishes the evening
In some ways it seems as if I’ve only just arrived in London; in others, it’s like I’ve been here forever. But I now have just under a week left here, so I’m racking up a lot of “last times”.1 Today was the last time I visited British Library Newspapers at Colindale, which is where
Raymond H. Fredette. The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain 1917-1918 and the Birth of the Royal Air Force. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1991 [1966]. Even though it’s now over 40 years old, this is still the best book around on the Gotha raids on Britain in 1917-8. F. S. Northedge. The
