Booooks.

Some more books. Like everyone, I’m reading The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Actually I read it in January, sketched out a review, and lost the notebook, so reading it again. (Spoiler: there isn’t a happy ending.)

Fascinatingly, Christopher Clark swaps the powers around; traditionally, the Germans are evil, the Austrians weird, the Russians hapless, the French are right, and the Brits got involved in some way we didn’t mean to, guv. Clark makes a strong case that the French were much more like the Germans, and the Germans more like the French, while the Brits were worryingly more like the Austrians. Confused yet? After all, Plan XVII was about as aggressive as a war plan can possibly be – we only remember the French being invaded because their invasion of Germany failed.

Langewiesche’s Aloft; I’ve already blogged a chunk out of this, but there is much more great stuff in there. Did you know that the inventor of the first turn-and-bank indicator had problems with customers who complained that the instrument worked fine in good weather but went haywire as soon as they flew into cloud?

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s The Pike is a life of Gabriele D’Annunzio, organised by themes rather than strict chronology. Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of it, and most of it is completely preposterous, utterly ridiculous, and literally true. His blog would have been epic, but the comments don’t bear thinking about. And you really, really didn’t want to lend that guy any money.

Serendipitously, Michael Ledeen is cited as a source.