The Quarterly Review; Number 538, October, 1938

London: John Murray, 1938. This Edition is not for sale in the U.S.A.. Wraps. Good. 382, [4], 45, [3] pages. The Quarterly Review was a literary and political periodical founded in March 1809 by the well known London publishing house John Murray. It ceased publication in 1967. Typical of early nineteenth-century journals, reviewing in the Quarterly was highly politicized and on occasion excessively dismissive. Writers and publishers known for their Unitarian or radical views were among the early journal's main targets. Prominent victims of scathing reviews included the Irish novelist Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson), the English poet and essayist Walter Savage Landor, the English novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her husband the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Among the authors in this issue are: James Molony Spaight (1877-1968) was easily the most prolific British writer on airpower during the first half of the 20th century, with over a dozen books to his name. He was unusual in that he was not a pilot, nor did he have any military experience. Instead he was a civil servant trained in law; from 1918 until his retirement in 1937 he was at the Air Ministry, ending up in quite a senior position. He was very precise and scholarly and his meticulous footnotes and references are an absolute gold mine for later historians. In particular, The Beginnings of Organized Air Power (1927) is essential on the early history of the Air Ministry and the various boards which preceded it, while the three editions of Air Power and War Rights (1924, 1933, 1947), about the legal questions surrounding bombing, are excellent guides to contemporary aviation literature and viewpoints. But his basic legal and ethical viewpoint was that aerial bombardment of cities was permissible to the same extent as were naval and land bombardments -- which is to say, it was permissible if there were military objectives within the city which could be attacked without indiscriminate harm to the inhabitants. During the Second World War he defended Bomber Command's policy of area bombing, in Bombing Vindicated (1944). Harper, George McLean 1884 (1863-1947), a leading Wordsworth scholar and first Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, grew up in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania. His fellow-townsman, Robert Bridges 1879, encouraged him to come to Princeton, and later introduced him to Woodrow Wilson 1879, who became a lifelong friend. Harper edited a volume of President Wilson's addresses in 1918. When the Woodrow Wilson Professorship of Literature was founded in 1926 by Edward W. Bok ``to commemorate Wilson's mastery of spoken and written English,'' Harper was unanimously chosen to be its first occupant. Sir Charles Alexander Petrie, 3rd Baronet (28 September 1895 - 13 December 1977) was a British historian. During the 1930s Petrie flirted with the far right. Impressed at first by Benito Mussolini (about whom he produced a short and respectful book in 1931), he attended the 1932 Volta Conference of fascists and sympathizers. Disposed initially to favor Sir Oswald Mosley, he joined in 1934 the broadly pro-Mosley January Club. At the same time he remained publicly hostile towards Nazism throughout; and his later view of Mosley, as expressed in his 1972 memoir A Historian Looks at his World, was thoroughly unflattering.