Back in February I was watching quite a bit of television - working my way through Orange is the New Black and actively seeking out medical dramas to the point of voluntarily buying a box set of Grey's Anatomy. (I'm not proud ( Read more... )

Just finishedA biography of Richard Hillary by Lovat Dickson, his publisher. Hillary was a young RAF fighter pilot during WWII who was shot down and spent several months in hospital with severe burns. After writing a book about the experience (which I've not yet got hold of) he managed to get back into operational flying and was killed in a crash ( Read more... )

Just finished

Christopher McKee, Sober Men and True: Sailor Lives in the Royal Navy 1900-45Very informative book about the "lower decks," particularly because it relies heavily on the words of the sailors themselves in order to give a picture of day-to-day life in the Navy. The author is interested in Naval history generally and points out how ( Read more... )

Very engaging long novel about a day in the life of a British bomber crew in 1943, which focuses equal detail on their German opposite numbers and the residents of the German town that is bombed that night. It is meticulously researched, at times perhaps bogged down in detail, but at its best it's really devastating. It reminded me of the film ( Read more... )

A bad combination, clearly! And so relevant to my interests. My mind is blown, even though I knew several of these facts separately.

A woman who has lived in the United States for 30 years and now hopes to become a naturalized citizen has run into a road block: her lack of religion ( Read more... )

Just finished
Peter Hales' Atomic Spaces is a really fascinating social history of the Manhattan Project: how it was administered, policed, regulated, even how landscapes were shaped by it. There are not nearly enough sociocultural histories of wartime and this one felt very unique: when I discovered that the author is an art/architectural ( Read more... )

* There is not a single Laurie/Andrew fic on the AO3. Isn't this... slightly odd?

* So the Plymouth Brethren were/are a peace church. This stunned me a bit, though perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. It makes the symmetry between Ralph and Andrew all the greater: Andrew, the pacifist who comes from a family of soldiers, and Ralph the sailor ( Read more... )

Just finished

Das Boot, by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, which is really an amazing book. (Novel, technically, but very non-fictional in feeling.) I can't help comparing it to The Cruel Sea; I enjoyed that but this is really far superior in literary terms. I had no idea that the Germans had embedded journalists on submarines during World War II. ( Read more... )

Have been watching the excellent Danger UXB, which currently seems to be available in its entirety on YouTube. If you haven't heard of it before, it's about a bomb disposal unit in London during World War II. Well-written, well filmed, funny and suspenseful ( Read more... )

Recently finishedWhat to mention? Richard J. Evans' "The Third Reich at War" was an exceptionally good treatment of a monumental subject, much more social history than military history, which was exactly what I wanted. Madeline Bunting's "The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands Under German Rule" was both gripping and damning ( Read more... )