Brett Holman
It’s the last day of AHA 2026, though the only things on the program for today are historical tours and as I decided (for reasons) to attend online this time, that means the conference is over for me. Though it felt rushed and a bit garbled, I think my talk on London’s air raid shelters in 1917-18...
Brett Holman
Recently, while editing the prewar chapter of Home Fires Burning, I made the decision to cut a few hundred words dealing with H.G. Wells’ ideas about aerial bombardment. And I feel good about it! Why is that? I’m not a Wells scholar by any means, but in the past I have had to engage with...
Brett Holman
A few years ago I took part in a very enjoyable Tales from Rat City podcast episode, hosted by David Waldron and centred around the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane panic from the perspective of Ballarat in the Victorian goldfields region. That had actors reading out primary source quotations,...
Brett Holman
My abstract for the Australian Historical Association’s 2026 conference, being held at Macquarie University from 29 June–3 July, has been accepted. My talk is entitled ‘The Underworld: Living and Dying in London’s Air Raid Shelters, 1917-1918’ and this is the abstract: London’s first...
Brett Holman
Content warning: descriptions of death and mutilation. The opening paragraph of the current draft of my next book, about one day over a century ago: Shortly before midday on 13 June 1917, Upper North Street School in Poplar was hit by a single bomb dropped from a German aeroplane. It...
NancyO
" ... an empty house is an admirable field for the operations of the imagination ..."-- from "The Haunted Vicarage," by Emeric Hulme-Beaman9780712355933British Library, 2025244 pphardcoverEver since Valancourt Books put out its first book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories, reading ghostly tales...
Brett Holman
This appeared in the correspondence section1 of Fortean Times 464 (December 2025), relating a story told by the grandmother of the author, Robert Flood: During the First World War her husband was serving in the Royal Naval Air Service and Nan was living with her parents in Temple Mill Lane,...
Brett Holman
Like many people – out of the sort of people who know these sorts of things, that is – I knew of Jan Smuts’ key role in the origins of both the RAF and the Air Ministry. It was the so-called ‘Smuts report‘ to the War Cabinet, in August 1917, which set the whole process rolling and, after some...
NancyO
9798886010619Stark House Press, 2024292 pppaperback(read earlier in May)I have to confess that I have never read a book by Sax Rohmer before although I own a copy of his Tales of Secret Egypt, one of the two books included in this double-feature edition from Stark House. I remember buying that...
NancyO
9798886010510Stark House Press, 2023241 pppaperbackBack again with the second entry in my three volumes of tales by Robert Hichens published by Stark House. This time, as S.T. Joshi notes in his introduction, these stories seem to hinge on a "crucial, life-altering decision" made by certain...
NancyO
"These occult things can't always be told of, even when they are known." 97886010565Stark House Press, 2023245 pppaperbackNot too long ago the very good people at Stark House Press sent me an ARC of a forthcoming collection of stories by Robert Hichens (1864-1959) entitled The Folly of Eustace...
NancyO
9780712354271British Library, 2022305 pppaperbackIt's been a while since I've been here -- vacation and then a subsequent case of covid have sucked up my time pretty much since Thanksgiving and I'm just now feeling up to posting again. I couldn't let the year go by without reading at least one...