Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Who doesn’t need another book on the origins of the First World War? Not me! This particular one focuses on the Balkan quagmire and its role in Great Power politics. Unlike some other recent interpretations (such as William Mulligan’s), Clark […]
[The views stated here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Society for Military History or the Journal of Military History. Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] While they only apply to journals published in the UK, the recommendations of the recent Finch Report on open access
I may be the only person now living to have read all three of Hamish Blair’s novels, published in 1930 and 1931 — I’m certainly the only person on LibraryThing to own any at all.1 I wish I could say that the rest of you are missing out, but you’re really not: they are tedious
Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1942: In the Shadow of War (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013). A collection of essays originating in a Military History and Heritage Victoria conference held in Melbourne earlier this year, which I’m now regretting not having attended. There are contributions on the Australia-Japan relationship before the Second World War
Over at The Appendix, ‘a new journal of narrative & experimental history’ to which you can subscribe, Felipe Fernandes Cruz has reproduced some intriguing declassified US documents from the early 1940s concerning rumours of clandestine German airfields in Brazil. The reason for the US interest in any evidence of German activity in South America, apart
An update on the whole Millwall thing. Well, a teaser, anyway. I’ve had an email from Chris Going letting me know how his research into the Luftwaffe’s photoreconnaissance flights over Britain on the first day of the Blitz, 7 September 1940. Can’t say too much, but he did authorise me to say that ‘interesting things
Kevin M. O’Reilly. Flyers of Time: Pioneer Aviation in Country Victoria: The First Fifty Years, a Collection. Dingley Village: Kevin M. O’Reilly, 2012. Mainly a compendium of newspaper articles relating to Victorian aviation outside Melbourne, covering the period 1911-1960. Also lots of contemporary photographs of aeroplanes from various sources, a selection of aviation ephemera such
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] The current conflict in Gaza has attracted much media attention for the so-called Twitter war being fought between the IDF and Hamas, or, more precisely, between the @IDFSpokesperson and @AlqassamBrigade accounts and their respective followers. Insults are traded back and forth, photos and videos of rocket attacks and
J. M. Spaight was a lawyer by training and a civil servant by profession, and as was such not generally prone to flights of fancy. His prewar books are scholarly and judicious compilations of various opinions and precedents regarding aerial warfare. But his wartime writing, such as The Sky’s the Limit (1940) and Bombing Vindicated
One factlet I’ve enjoyed dropping on the heads of students is the origin of the word ‘blockbuster’. Now it is widely understood to mean a hugely successful movie (as well as a once-highly successful video rental chain — remember those?). It has even been claimed that this is the original sense of the word: supposedly,
