Hello everybody, I seem to have got here at last, it’s been a long long time but here I am and jolly glad I am to be here at last (to quote Amy Johnson). I’ve been in Blighty for almost 24 hours at this point; here are some random thoughts and observations. Of course these […]
For the first time in nearly two years, the number of books I have out from the uni library has dropped to zero. Which can mean only one thing: I’m about to fly out to the UK! There will be a blogging hiatus but it’s not likely to be more than a few days, if
Clive Harris. Walking the London Blitz. Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2006. I haven’t been buying lots of travel-type books, but I could hardly pass this one up! Nevil Shute. On the Beach. Geneva: Edito-Service S.A., 1968 [1957]. Finally found it.
The big trip to the UK looms. It’s my first and I’m greatly looking forward to it — all the more so because I have long been fascinated by the place and its history. Although I can’t say it was always my plan to do a PhD in British military aviation history, looking back, there
A couple of weeks ago, I showed how the blitzkrieg became the Blitz. Now I’ll show how the knock-out blow became the blitzkrieg. Despite the abandon with which the term blitzkrieg is thrown around these days to describe the “lightning” German campaigns of the early years of the Second World War, it turns out that
I’ve been good, I really have! I haven’t bought any books for ages, since I’ve been economising in advance of the UK trip. But yesterday I went looking for a Shute to take with me, and couldn’t find one, but instead came away with an armful of other books. Midge Gillies. Waiting for Hitler: Voices
Around Easter, I happened to have a camera on me when an airship was passing overhead, and managed to take a couple of pictures before the camera batteries died. But they didn’t look quite right, and eventually I realised that it was because the airship was too red. Everybody knows, at least subconsciously, that airships
The other day I came across a fascinating article by H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore. Mencken was very interested in colloquial English, and to this end penned “War words in England”, published in the February 1944 American Speech, about new words coming into use in the British press as a result of the
This is very cool: the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s foremost military history museum, seems to be getting into blogging in a big way! Today, there was an announcement on H-War (and Victoria’s cross? is already on the case) of a group blog running in conjunction with an exhibition about Australia’s participation in the big Western
Mark Connelly has written several very fine books on British military history. He also has an amusingly self-referential Wikipedia entry (emphasis added): Mark Connelly is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of History, at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He is also the author of a book on the Second World War
