A little history of the Scareship Age

Recent Articles

• Body horror in the Blitz

  7 August 2011 in 1930s, 1940s, Archives, Books, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Rumours

  Fears of poison gas attacks during the Blitz don't receive much attention from historians, and with good reason: not only did they not take place, but the evidence (for example, the number of gas masks being carried about) suggests that most people were complacent about the possibility. But not all. On 2 September 1940, a [...]

• Fremantle

  6 August 2011 in Australia, Family history, Pictures, Travel 2011

  As I'd never been out west before, I allowed myself a couple of days after the Perth conference for sightseeing. First I travelled down to Fremantle, not far south of Perth. Fremantle is a port city on the Indian Ocean, which is why it has not one but two branches of the Western Australian Museum [...]

• Acquisitions

  5 August 2011 in Acquisitions, Books

  Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds. Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. The proceedings of the Exeter conference I attended a couple of years ago, which sought to expand our understanding of the civilian experience of aerial bombardment beyond Britain and Germany by comparison with [...]

• A little history of the Scareship Age

  31 July 2011 in Blogging and tweeting, Books, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Publications, Tools and methods

  A couple of months ago, Alun Salt did a very nice thing for me: he unexpectedly assembled some of the posts I've written here about phantom airships into an e-book. Using that as the basis, I've had a go at learning how to do e-books myself. (Alun recommended using Jutoh, an e-book project manager, and [...]

• The last knock-out blow

  28 July 2011 in 1940s, Books, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals

  The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940), by Herbert Best (better known as the author of the 'Desmond the dog detective' books, though not by much), may well be the last knock-out blow novel, the last novel where (conventional) bombers play the decisive part in a war. In this war, indeed, they are too decisive, knocking away the [...]