I don’t often mention the various history carnivals here, which makes me a bad netizen; but I’m trying to get into the habit of picking out my favourite post from the monthly Military History Carnival. MilHisCar III is now up, and although a great post on the military origins of the phrase “basket case” did […]
Last year I talked about J. M. Spaight’s The Sky’s the Limit (here, here and here), and how its account of the then-developing Battle of Britain was somewhat surprising to anyone familiar with the standard narrative of the summer of 1940. Which is not at all to say that the standard narrative is wrong, just
A promising new entrant into the military historioblogosphere: Alistair Hollington’s Historic battlefields, who covers 20th century British military history but is particularly interested in First World War unit and individual histories. Alistair’s doing an MA in First World War studies, which looks like a lot of fun. (Via Investigations of a Dog.)
It’s not often that I happen across a discussion of knock-out blow novels outside specialist literature, so I was interested to see that Gideon Haigh (probably best known as a cricket writer, but also a fine essayist) talks about Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) in the current issue of The Monthly. The
During the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, British newspapers regularly published official German statements about the progress of the air war. Those relating to the war over Britain could be checked against both British communiques and, to an extent, personal experience. There were large discrepancies: for example, for 7 September 1940, the Luftwaffe claimed
This post is an exercise in — well, I’m not sure if there’s a name for it, but I found some medium-resolution images on eBay of a pamphlet printed by the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League in 1934. (The seller says 1933, but all other evidence I have on this group is from 1934;
The title relates to both the content of a paper I gave yesterday at the School’s Work In Progress Day, and to my own state of mind beforehand! I think it went well, though — at least there was no rotten fruit thrown at the end! — which is good because it was the first
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Here’s a confession: I don’t really get Guernica — the painting, that is, not the event (which is why I haven’t mentioned it in this series until now). I understand that it’s a passionate reaction by a great artist to the tragedy unfolding in his own country. It’s physically imposing,
This post is about a revelation I had a while back, which those of you with a firmer grasp of the English language than I will think is nothing at all new (and you’re right!) The thing is that I’d always been puzzled by the word barrage. This gets used a lot by journalists: ‘the
The latest Fortean Times (June 2007) has a great article by Kim Newman on Hammer Films, the much-loved British horror film production company. While discussing the early 1970s, when Hammer’s fortunes were declining, he refers in passing to ‘the tragically unmade Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls‘. That’s all he said, but it was enough … could it
