W.E. Johns. Biggles and the Black Peril. London: Red Fox, 2004 [1935]. I felt a bit silly standing in the children’s section of the bookshop looking through all their Biggles books, but I guess I could have pretended I was buying it for a nephew or something …
I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging for primary sources, when a book called The Peril of the White caught my eye – not because it has anything to do with my topic, but because of the author, who has one of the most splendidly silly
From the just-because-I-can department. As an ex-physicist, I like to see numerical data plotted in a graph, as well as in tabular form – it’s much easier to visualise what’s going on. I don’t have any particular need for this right now, but I’ve been playing around with a few plotting packages anyway. The figure
Like about half the historioblogosphere,If Google is any guide, that word is original to me. I’m not proud of this. I’ve been playing with LibraryThing (where I am airminded, naturally enough). Well, more than playing – I’ve added just about all my books (even the dodgy pseudoscience and pseudohistory ones – I’m a paid-up skeptic,
Basil Collier. Heavenly Adventurer: Sefton Brancker and the Dawn of British Aviation. London: Secker & Warburg, 1959. A big wheel in the RFC, for most of the 1920s he was in charge of civil aviation at the Air Ministry. He was killed in the R101 disaster in 1930. Peter Lewis. The British Fighter Since 1912:
We have … under the stress of war, made practical discoveries in the art of government almost comparable to the immense discoveries made at the same time in the art of flying. Economist and social reformer William Beveridge, on the advances in government forced by the First World War; quoted in John Stevenson, British Society
Oh yes he does. Actually this is from a great site, www.biggles.info, which has the front covers and illustrations from all 98 (!) Biggles books, along with plot summaries if you can’t be bothered reading them all. (The covers are on the main page.) The main site, www.wejohns.com, gives the same treatment to all the
OK, I promise to stop doing that. This time, the answer seems to be: probably … Coming via Charlie’s Diary is a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on the new US exit strategy in Iraq, which reports that “A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that
Well, not really. Still, it’s an interesting parallel. A RAF officer, Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, is being court-martialled for refusing to serve in Iraq. A doctor, he has already served two tours there; now he thinks that the war itself was illegal, in that it was not authorised by the United Nations. This is reminiscent of
Geoffrey Best. Churchill and War. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005. As previously noted. There’s disappointingly little on Churchill’s “wilderness years” – OK, so there wasn’t actually a war on then, but this was the time when the foundations of the Churchill-as-prophet-of-war legend were laid. And it’s the period of his career that
