This week marks the 101st anniversary of Passchendaele, the New Zealand part in the Third Battle for Ypres – and the day of New Zealand most lethal human catastrophe of all time. On that dark day, 12 October 1917, some 843 New Zealanders were killed – either outright, or left dying on the battlefield. And … More Remembering Passchendaele, 101 years on
In December 1941, after months of rising tensions over an oil and steel embargo, Japan attacked both the United States and the British Empire. New Zealand had long felt it was in the firing line – even 35 years earlier when Japan was an ally of Britain. And the effects of the ‘Japanese blitzkrieg’ swiftly … More This week’s feature book cover
I am always intrigued by the way that, every so often, western society is seized with a ‘social panic’ in which some recent and usually small-scale event becomes evidence of a supposedly deep-seated problem that is going to bring society crashing down in ruin. The archetype, for me, is New Zealand’s Elbe Milk Bar scandal … More Social panics – when the stupid becomes the normal
This year a whole series of my older print books have been brought back into print as second editions. They’ve come with new covers – strongly branded, themed, and to my mind highly evocative of the subject matter. I featured the first of them a couple of weeks back. Here’s another. I wrote it way … More This week’s feature book cover – Blue Water Kiwis
One of the main features of New Zealand’s society, last century, was its ‘cultural cringe’. It was a classic inferiority complex; the idea that, on the one hand, we were punching above our weight and beating the world; yet on the other, that we would always somehow never be good enough. My own work has … More Reconciling the battle for Crete
After some adventures in which, it seemed, couriers couldn’t deliver anything to my post office box, the advance print copies of my second-edition military histories finally arrived this week. Four of my earlier military histories are being re-released as new and revised editions in the run-up to Christmas: Battle for Crete, Desert Duel, Italian Odyssey … More This week’s feature book covers
One of the early terms I learned in the publishing business is ‘bind-up’. It wasn’t the first term I learned. But it came close. It’s not what you might think. I mean, all books are bound, by definition. But ‘bind-up’ has a specific meaning. It refers to collecting several related books under one cover and … More Book bind-ups and how to avoid stepping in them
