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...Unfortunately for my purposes, all of them are American or monthly or both -- well, okay, these are interesting and useful too, but they don't fit into my list. But UNZ.org does have several British literary journals from the early twentieth century: Cyril Connolly's Horizon, F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny, and The Bookman (though this was a Hodder and Staughton publication, it published general reviews and cultural commentary too). For example, here's G...

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...y a large percentage of Airminded's readers could be described in this way -- not that there's anything wrong with that! As an aside, I think a similar sort of analysis could be applied to spaceflight, but more complicated because of the longer timescales and multiple physical scales involved. So, near-Earth spaceflight is becoming routinised -- we're seeing the birth of space tourism for the very rich, the equivalent of, say, the early 1930s in a...

...presenters either in person at the conference venue or presenting via our online platform. Whether in person or online, all presentations and panel discussions will be available to view live. Presentations may take a variety of forms as follows: ‘Standard session’ presentations involve a full paper (video, slideshow or text) published online 2 weeks prior to the conference. This is followed by a short, strictly 10 minute, live presentation (in pe...

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...or hostels (I think!), but would probably prefer hotels if I can afford it -- which I probably can't, but anyway I can worry about that later. As for what I'd like to see: well, British history-type stuff obviously. Military history, planes, all that good stuff -- yes of course. But I can get a lot of that in and around London. I love museums and the like; picturesque country landscapes are nice but we have some of that here, so that's less of a p...

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...ut to be more powerful than he expected, and the aircraft took off briefly -- how briefly is not clear -- and then crashed. Coandă was not a pilot and was lucky to escape with only minor injuries, especially given the flames streaming from the engine; his aeroplane caught fire upon impact. But the jet engine was not the only innovative feature of this remarkable aeroplane. Consider the wings: there were only one-and-a-half (ie, a sesquiplane rathe...

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...spapers I've had to break up the listing in order to make it more readable -- Scotland and Ireland, take note. This raises the question of whether I will continue to include Welsh-language newspapers in this listing: it would make my life easier if I didn't have to check them too, and not many researchers outside of Wales can read Welsh. But when combined with the superior user interface and the completely free access, this makes WNO the most impr...

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...y at night. The only defence, he believed, was speed, not guns. His design -- the P.B.49, a twin-engine monoplane with a crew of three -- more than met Macmillan's specifications, and had the added virtues of being small and inexpensive.2 In fact, it was around the same size as the later Mosquito, and about as fast; but had more than twice the bombload at its maximum combat range of 8000 miles, itself more than five times the range of the wooden w...

32 Comments

...r seen this spelling before. Yes, umlauts are often anglicised in this way -- Goering instead of Göring, for example -- but in this case, Raeder is how it is written in German sources (for example, in his obituary in Der Spiegel). More seriously, he uses newspaper sources indiscriminately, particularly non-British ones -- he appears, for example, to take reports of peace feelers and the like at face value, making no attempt to check the veracity o...

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...It's partly why I start in 1908, too. It's a good question about the stats -- in fact I think I'll work it deserves a post of its own. The short answer, though, is that the ratio of casualties per ton decreased between WWI and WWII, and the V-weapons had higher ratios than bombs. Bob: Would love to publish a book from it ... once it's submitted, I'll start looking for a publisher. CK: Sorry, I doubt any of the V-Force will make it in! Ricardo: Yes...

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...s. It's on the "knock-out blow" - the long-feared, much-discussed but never-actually-happened massive aerial blow which many people assumed would start (and end) the next war. So I need to piece together how contemporary writers (novelists and public intellectuals, mostly) conceived of the knock-out blow, and how these ideas originated and changed over time. A sub-theme of the chapter will be about how ideas of the knock-out blow were, explicitly...