I wrote a short book about for Bloomsbury Music’s 331/3 series on individual artists and albums, but things didn’t work out and it’s now been published by Takahe, the small outfit in Coventry run by Steve Hodder.  It was Takahe which in 2020 published Slouching Towards Big Pink – essays on Bob Dylan and The …

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According to the Met Office last month’s mean temperature of 14.9 celsius makes it the hottest June since 1940.  A marked feature about weather patterns in the 1940s is the harshness of the winters across Europe, as the German Army found to its cost in Russia from late 1941.  For the British it’s a postwar …

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David Campbell Bannerman has been in the news a great deal recently as a cheer leader for Boris Johnson.  He is chair of the self-styled Conservative Democratic Organisation, a body loud in its criticism of Rishi Sunak’s premiership and its insistence that Johnson is innocent of all findings of the Commons’ Privileges Committee. Campbell Bannerman’s …

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Mountbatten, Cold War and Empire, 1945-79 and the paperback edition of its prequel, Mountbatten Apprentice War Lord were both published at the tail end of last year.  There was so much that I couldn’t include in the second volume, including the following: On the first weekend in June 1979 Earl Mountbatten of Burma had no …

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Nothing now surprises me given the events of the past seven years, but as mind boggling as Coventry City’s progress to the Championship play off final for promotion to the Premier League is surely the news that Qatar is giving serious thought to staging the 2025 Rugby League World Cup now that France have pulled …

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Last month the New Statesman published a special edition to mark the magazine’s 110th anniversary.  It was a more modest affair than the centenary issue, to which I contributed as the author of The New Statesman, 1913-1932 Portrait of a Political Weekly (and good luck if you can find let alone afford a copy of …

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The blog accompanying the research and writing of my life of aviation pioneer and industrialist Sir Richard Fairey ended with publication of the book five years ago.  As then I remain Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton.  So why resurrect the blog under a new name – shameless self-promotion?  Well yes, …

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The Man Who Built The Swordfish – The Life of Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 (I.B. Tauris, 2018, 455pp) will be available from the end of April 2018, priced £25. Cover: Swordfish-05-revised_design-alt

It totals 175,890 words, and it took four years to write, off and on (and a considerable part of those four years was ‘off’), but The Man Who Built The Swordfish: the Life of Sir Richard Fairey, 1887-1956 is finally written.  The next stage is compiling the bibliography and selecting the photographs, after which I …

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With the tenth chapter written, and despatched to Jane Tennant and Charles Fairey for comments and colour, the end is nigh.  In terms of writing what remains is for me to reread chapters 1-10 and then write the conclusion.  What a long strange trip it’s been…  In writing the chapter on the final decade of …

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