Brett Holman is lecturer in modern European history in the School of Humanities at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. His research interests revolve around the place of aviation in British society and culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Primarily this means trying to understand how people responded to the threat of strategic bombing, the fabled ‘knock-out blow from the air’. A book based on his PhD thesis, entitled The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941, is forthcoming with Ashgate.