Dropping Their Eggs 
Patrick Wright
- A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg
- The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 by Robin Niellands
- Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War by Frances FitzGerald
‘I cannot recall taking a single piss during my childhood, whether outside or at home in the outhouse, when I didn’t choose a target and bomb it. At five years of age I was already a seasoned bombardier.’ This is an unusual way of embarking on an analysis of modern warfare and its technologies, but then Sven Lindqvist has long been writing history in his own way. Oral historians know him as the author of Dig Where You Stand: How to Research a Job, a combined manifesto and manual published in 1978, based on the premise that no history has been more hidden or distorted than that of modern business. Shareholders and directors enjoy history in the form of capital, but aren’t in the least curious about the past itself. Researching the Swedish cement industry, for which his grandfather had worked, Lindqvist found nothing except crudely argued assumptions that management was always right and the shareholders always vastly more important than the workers, whose main contribution was to obstruct growth and progress. His response was to encourage people to research the history of their own workplaces to recover the information ignored in the managerial version. Within a few years of the book’s appearance, ten thousand researchers were using material from their own working lives to make history ‘dangerous’ again.
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Patrick Wright’s Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War, will be published in October by Oxford. The sequel, which will appear next year, is concerned with Rex Warner, Barbara Castle, Stanley Spencer, Clement Attlee, A.J. Ayer and the other British delegates who visited China in 1954, the fifth anniversary of the proclamation of the People’s Republic.
Other articles by this contributor:
Cubist Slugs · The Art of Camouflage
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