Air University Press, the publishing arm of the USAF‘s Air University, has most of its books available in PDF format for free download. As one might expect, the subject matter is mostly American and recent, but some are on-topic for me, including Williamson Murray’s Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe, 1933-1945, George K. Williams’ Biplanes and […]
Stephen Dorril. Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism. London: Viking, 2006. I’m always up for books on British fascism. This one is perhaps aiming to do a Kershaw — a sort of history of the BUF through a biography of its leader. ‘[I]mportant and controversial’, according to the blurb. Medical Manual of Chemical Warfare.
This is my reading list for the next month or so, all from the period 1932-1941. After that, I’ll be back at the State Library to read some more. There’s about twice as many books as there were for the preceding period (1917-1931), though not all of these will turn out to be of great
New blog alert! Great War Fiction is the blog of George Simmers, a PhD student at Oxford Brookes. He’s working on fiction written during and after the First World War, particularly the representations of soldiers and ex-soldiers therein. He has only been blogging a couple of days, but already has four posts up, including the
An interesting quote from Robert Graves’ autobiography, Goodbye to All That (London: Penguin, 1960 [1929]), 120. He was in London on leave; the date is not specified but it was before Loos, so I’d guess it was late summer, 1915. The Zeppelin scare had just begun. Some friends of the family came in one night,
Well, since everyone else seems to be revamping their blogs (and also because I’m expecting visitors soon), I thought I’d try to keep up with the Joneses or at least not fall too far behind. At first I was just going to put in a header graphic (as seen above), but I found it wasn’t
Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds. Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945. London: Pimlico, 2006. Scholars of the calibre of Richard Overy and Tami Davis Biddle examine the Dresden raid from a variety of angles. Hew Strachan contributes a chapter on “Strategic bombing and the question of civilian casualties up to 1945”. Why isn’t
The BBC has put online a catalogue of recordings held of its radio and television broadcasts since about 1930! Not the recordings themselves, mind you, but details such as broadcast dates, participants, and programme summaries, in many cases. Nor is it a complete record of what was broadcast: if it wasn’t recorded (as many early
Football, by which I mean Australian Rules, pretty much bores me to tears. Given that I live in the home of Aussie rules, it’s something that I just have to put up with. Melbourne is obsessed with the sport for more than half the year, between the start of the pre-game season in February and
Regarding the Japanese Air Force, which many people, he said, were inclined to discount as a second-rate body equipped with obsolete aircraft and lacking skillful and daring pilots, Air Vice-Marshal Pulford said that he certainly does not underrate its capacity. When it was suggested to him that it might be compared with the Italian Air
