Four Mags

A QUICK catch-up on recent magazine-reading.

Fab four

The September/October 2019 edition of Slingshot has a good variety of articles, with the most interesting for me being Mick Hession's on military campaigns in 15th century Ireland.
The October/November 2019 edition of Toy Soldier Collector, labelled "15th Anniversary Issue," has its usual great eye-candy.
The Sep/Oct 2019 edition of Ancient Warfare is themed around the importance of geography in ancient battles, and I found the whole issue fascinating.
The October 2019 edition of History Today has a lurid cover but interesting contents, including church-going in Victorian and Edwardian Britain (it was not as popular as you might think) and how women shaped the monarchy in France (a much bigger subject than space allows, but you have to start somewhere).

Slingshot - July/August 2019

ISSUE 325 of Slingshot arrived last week while I was in Torquay playing chess.

Slingshot … definitely better late than never

The Society of Ancients' magazine is consistently one of my very favourite wargaming publications.
But somehow I felt this edition was not up to scratch, despite having articles on Cannae, the Trojan War and infantry manoeuvrability - subjects normally guaranteed to grab my attention.
The Editor promises the next issue will be published more promptly, and I am certainly eagerly looking forward to it.

History Today - September 2019

THE third and final issue of my cheap mini-subscription to History Today proved a very welcome surprise.
I found more-or-less the whole magazine interesting, including features on Himmler's obsession with 'witches', life on the Mississippi, punkahwallahs in British India and a Transylvanian enemy of the Habsburgs.

It's Himm again

It was particularly refreshing to find little of the nanny-ish PC mania that has been prevalent in the magazine recently.

Ancient Warfare - Jul/Aug 2019

ISSUE 1 of volume XIII of Ancient Warfare magazine is themed on "hired help from overseas - Hellenistic mercenary armies meddling in Magna Graecia," and is the best history and/or wargaming magazine I have read for a long time.

Ancient Warfare ... more than just a stab in the right direction

I found every article full of interest, with the notable exception of one supposedly on ancient combined arms, but in fact concentrating on modern combined arms (ominously, we are told it is the first part of a series - but maybe future parts will get round to actually discussing ancient warfare).

Soviet War Memorial

AM visiting the Czech Republic, and specifically Olomouc, a city that used to be a major centre of the Greater Moravian Empire.

No prizes for guessing which country erected this memorial, nor to which war it refers

As I believe can be seen from the picture, the memorial to the Red Army is still well maintained.

Paddington Station War Memorial

THE war memorial at Paddington station in West London looks in such a good state of repair and maintenance that it would be easy to mistake it as a recent dedication.
This effect is enhanced by a plaque that states the memorial commemorates 3,312 employees of the Great Western Railway who "IN THE WORLD WARS … GAVE THEIR LIVES FOR KING AND COUNTRY"

The war memorial at Paddington station

But the memorial's statue, of a soldier reading a letter, presumably from home, shows a figure with a distinctly WW1 trenchy look.
That is because the memorial was unveiled on Armistice Day 1922, with a new plaque added much later.

Tricky Conversions

I CAN report fairly good success with the Tricky Stick I bought to solve the problem of getting superglue to work with soft plastic.
It was needed because I could find no suitable figures for Prussian artillerymen for my Project Kaiser 54mm refight of the Franco-Prussian War.
I wanted to convert Armies In Plastic Union artillery crew from the American Civil War by replacing their heads with pickelhaubed Prussian heads.
Superglue alone did not come close to getting the job done, but by first preparing the Union torsos and the Prussian heads with Tricky Stick, I was able to come up with appropriate-looking crews.
There was an awful moment when one head fell off at the smallest touch. For a moment I thought I might have to restart from scratch.
But the other conversions proved fine, and the failed one worked at the second attempt.
By adding some Prussian infantry to the six converted Union men, I have come up with three sets of four-man crews.

Three crews with two guns - all from Armies In Plastic

And here is how a gun and crew look beside one of my newly finished houses:

Housing Improvements

I HAVE finished improving the £2 houses I bought from The Works at Stratford, East London.

The final step, after priming and painting, was to add doors, windows and chimneypots ordered from  Irregular Miniatures of Great Edstone, North Yorkshire.

No one could mistake them for being diorama-standard, but they work for toy soldiers.

Toy Soldier Collector - August/September 2019

ISUUE 89 of Toy Solider Collector is full as usual with glossy pix of metal and plastic toy soldiers.

Included among the contents is a four-page article by me about my 54mm Project Kaiser plans for refighting the Franco-Prussian War on the 150th anniversaries of its battles.

History Today - August 2019

THE August edition (Vol 69 issue 8) of History Today starts off pretty well, if you ignore the twerp at the front who claims "racial divisions" are the "most enduring legacy" of the American Civil War.
Articles on so-called witch marks in limestone caves in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, Graham Greene in Havana, thefts of antiquities in Renaissance Italy, military slaves in Islamic states and de Gaulle's righthand man Philippe Leclerc all held my interest.

August's History Today … promising start

But then the right-on brigade gets its turn with reams of space devoted to Peterloo (what a foreigner would think of such detailed coverage beggars belief) and to 18th-century women who did not go to university but were nevertheless scholarly. Perhaps the magazine should be renamed Social History Today.
The final straw, for me, comes at the back with 20 questions to a woman who specialises in "contemporary history," a contradiction in terms to say the least. Asked to name "which history book has had the greatest influence on you," she lists The Handmaid's Tale, The House Of The Spirits and 1984.