B is for Birthday Books

Some serious reading over the next few weeks! All five are interesting titles, covering some of the less common gaps between the 'usual' or 'popular' periods.

Paul of the Plastic Warriors blog will tell you I'm no real fan of aircraft, but I've always had a soft-spot for the Liberator (which immediately gives me the mis-lyriced earworm: "I'm a Liberator...a Liberator, I Liberate"), so this treatise on that forgotten corner of the war; the China/Burma/India theatre - is fascinating.

The Italians in WWII always got a poor press when I was a kid, and with the Airfix figures going from dirt-rare to relatively common in the late-1990's (with several different boxings of re-issue), I might be tempted to paint-up a few of mine.

Uniforms of the infamous Protestant-fundimentalist, colonial, terrorist-insurgency (at least they didn't try to blow-up Stonehenge) is a soft-back reprint of one of the old Blandford's and has some lovely illustrations, while the Crimea-1914 tome is B&W but very interesting and covering nations not normally given a word - Serbia, China et al.

While the Tashen has been on my wants list for years. This re-print is missing some of the original 19thC plates and I'd say the captions leave a bit to be desired (and require a looking-glass...but that's the age thing!), but still a rich experience with three wonderful plates on Landsknechts, albeit described as French, they are in the same dress as the German/Italian 'Swiss mercenaries'. Sections on Egypt, Greece and Rome are also lovely, with a lot of medieval stuff and a whole section on the peoples and tribes encountered during the age of discovery (that's 'age of unwarranted expansion' to your modern sensibilities!).