Phil

Good article on Latin American armour

Now, while I dilly and dally and dance from topic to topic when it comes to most aspects of military history, there are (as regular blog readers, and certainly most of the Osprey Bloggers, will know) two subjects for which I am a stone cold sucker. Essentially, if it's Latin America, I'm sold. Similarly, if it's up-gunned and up-armoured vehicles* (the more improvised the better!), I'm there with bells on.

Postcard Competition Winner

Congratulations to Ildirim, who wins the Postcard Competition! A few weeks back, I asked for suggestions of great artwork from our books to be included in our forthcoming postcard collection, Soldier.

Postcard Competition Update

Thanks to all those who have submitted suggestions already – and those of you who haven't, get cracking! The deadline for this little competition will be the end of the month – midnight on Monday 31st August (or, more likely, 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, when I get into work). For full details, please visit the original blog post. Any suggestions can be made there or here, and we'll get to picking a winner as soon as the deadline is up.

Terrain building inspiration

Joe came into the office today with a little surprise for me – some adobe buildings in 15mm scale, made out of balsa wood and intended for some wargaming further down the line. Now, Joe is a bit of a legend when it comes to making terrain – I've got some cool hillbilly shacks (now with added outhouse) that he put together for one of our projects that only partially got off the ground before we (I) were (was) sidetracked by other shiny things, and a load of English Civil War-y barns and farm buildings in various stages of ruin. Recently, he's taken to moulding and casting his own flagstones, walls and the like in plaster, resulting in some exceptionally chunky Medieval structures.

You can pick an Osprey Postcard - and get your name on it!

Many of you will have seen Battle, our first postcard collection, and some of you may be aware of Dogfight, the second collection, [shamelessplug]coming March 2010![/shamelessplug], featuring 40 of the best pieces of art to grace the covers of our Aircraft of the Aces, Aviation Elite Units, Combat Aircraft and Duel titles. Now you can get your chance to select the artwork for one of the postcards that is appearing in a new collection!

The British Army go into battle with Osprey

... Osprey Assault body armour, that is. Come autumn, the existing Osprey tactical kit will be replaced with the new, lighter Assault design, intended to provide the soldier with the same level of protection, with less of the weight and cumbersome bulk. Intended specifically for troops on foot, the redesign comes about following experiences in Afghanistan, where foot patrols are more common due to the terrain and conditions...

Dogs of War

I came across this video the other day, and it started me thinking (rarely a good sign)... Given how well-received our recent New Vanguard on War Elephants has been, and the comments on our April Fools' blog, the idea of a New Vanguard title on dogs in war might not be as impossible as it might once have seemed.

Napoleonics R Us

As a long-time Osprey fan, one of the most frustrating aspects of having published thousands of books in their 40-year history is the inevitable fact that sometimes, some of them will be out-of-print. In best-case scenarios, this is resolved by finding a second-hand copy; in a worst-case scenario, a volume will have been out of print for so long that it's impossible to find a copy that doesn't cost the GDP of a small banana republic.

New Series from Osprey Publishing: Arriving in 2010

The results of a series of strategic meetings in 2007/08 are now starting to filter through into new series and new titles. Alongside Raid in September and Command in 2010 we are pleased to announce another new series scheduled for 2010. This new series War Animal reflects the unprecedented response to our recent New Vanguard title on War Elephants and allows us to examine from yet another previously unexplored angle, forgotten aspects of both campaigns and combatants.

Get your hands on our postcard collection... before they are all gone

Every now and then we like to try something a little different. Last year it was the hugely popular Men-at-Arms Celebration. This year our departure from our usual book publishing programme came in the form of Battle: The Osprey Postcard Collection.

Osprey by Post

Never let it be said that my job isn’t fun. Hot on the heels of the Osprey Men-at-Arms: A Celebration volume, which saw me spending days rummaging through all our Men-at-Arms books and selecting the best artwork going, I was lucky enough to be asked to do a similar thing for Battle – a collection of postcards of some of the greatest battlescenes Osprey artists have ever depicted.

A new war, a new Osprey?

As avid fans of our series will no doubt know, our coverage of military history doesn’t stop at just ‘history’, and several of our books, exemplified by the recent Elite double on Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, are as up-to-the-minute as is possible. If the reception of those two books is anything to go by, there is a lot of interest in modern topics. This is not a new phenomenon – throughout Osprey’s 40-year history, we have consistently addressed ‘modern’ conflicts, from the Falklands (the original 3-volume Men-at-Arms mini-series was published in November 1982, only 5 months after the war ended) to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (the relevant Men-at-Arms covering the troops engaged on both sides at the height of the conflict published in 1986, and written by an author who had just returned from the country).

Cleburne Graphic Novel

While by no means an expert on the American Civil War, my interest in the period has been piqued recently by a variety of sources, notably Gettysburg, a film I am ashamed to say I hadn't seen until relatively recently (though I at least watched it and Gods and Generals in the right order), and am currently devouring as much as I can on the subject from the first volume of Shelby Foote's 3-volume narrative to Bernard Cornwell's Starbuck Chronicles. One of the pleasures of working in publishing are the occasional advances or preview copies of titles which cross my desk (usually by way of the Marketing staff, who still don't seem to have realised that it would be easier to just give me the freebies to start with, saving themselves from a lot of hassling). So when Cleburne from Rampart Press arrived, I was pretty chuffed, to say the least.

New New Vanguards?

Recently, I became a member of a very select, very elite club within the hallowed halls of Osprey (it's like the Illuminati, but with more tanks...)

Aaar me hearties! It'd be International Talk Like a Pirate afore long!

Avast thar ye landlubbers. Did ye not know that on the morrow it be International Talk Like a Pirate Day? Aaar, and here in the brig on the good ship Osprey, we shall all be doin the same. Wi' a bottle of grog, some pieces o' eight and plenty of chances for any of the salty seadogs hereabout to walk the plank.

Faintheart Never Won Fair Lady

A brief period browsing on YouTube led me to discover this little gem: a trailer for a forthcoming British comedy set in the world of Viking re-enactment.

Dying with their boots on

Given that the so-called ‘Wild West’ lasted a mere quarter of a century at best, it is, after World War II, perhaps the most-filmed period of history. Admittedly, the popularity of the western peaked early, and faded into relative obscurity by the 1980s, while other films maintained or grew in prominence (coming to a cinema near you: my rants about superhero movies…), no-one seemed to care for the classic western anymore. I can quite easily understand the reasoning for this – for a 25-odd year period, hundreds of stories had been crammed into it, probably totalling more runtime than the ‘wild west’ itself actually lasted, and moviegoers were fed up with a stale genre.

Battlefield: Bad Company – a view from the trenches

Recently, I picked up a copy of the new Battlefield game for the XBox360 – Bad Company. Under a week later, I have now completed the game, and feel prepared to wax lyrical about it! Firstly, I should probably explain that though I completed it in under a week, the game is not a short one – the missions are quite long, and it’s so much fun I didn’t want to stop playing half the time!

The Greatest Military quotes?

Recently, with one of my typical flights of fancy, I started to ponder on some of the military sayings and quotes that have achieved fame throughout history. My personal favourites are: "The sun will never set on the British Empire – God does not trust the English in the dark" – Anon

HMS Ontario Discovered

On October 31, 1780, the HMS Ontario, a 22-gun brig sloop was swamped by a gale as she crossed Lake Ontario from Fort Niagara. Lost with all hands, 60 British soldiers, 40 mainly Canadian crew and possibly as many as 30 American prisoners-of-war, she remained at the bottom of the lake for 228 years, before being discovered some 500 feet down...

Free Online WW1 Dogfighting Game

I was browsing the web recently, and came across a link to this WWI dogfight game. It's free, it's fun, it's pretty quick to play through the 10 levels, and you get to shoot down a zeppelin...

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of Crushing Disappointment

I am a huge Indiana Jones fan. Raiders, Temple and Crusade pretty much account for 25% of my lifetime film viewing on their own. So when I heard that a 4th film was in the making, I was naturally rather excited. Then came...

Making Better History

Whilst I was enjoying a lazy weekend not so long ago, I was indulging in one of my guilty pleasures: the sheer joy that is Red Dawn. Yes, I have to admit that this humble little film about plucky all-American high school kids standing up to the onslaught of a full-on Soviet invasion force is one of my all time favourite conservative paranoia films. Given that the Cold War was in full swing, and a full-scale military attack by Warsaw Pact forces was a very real threat for the West at the time...

I'm not the man they think I am at home; Oh no, no, no, I'm a rocket man

If the story of Icarus teaches us anything, it is that man was not meant to fly. However, one 48-year-old Swiss former fighter pilot has a different opinion. Yves Rossy unveiled his self-made rocket pack this Wednesday, and proceeded to leap from an aircraft over the Alps and fly at speeds of up to 186 miles per hour, before parachuting back to earth. This stunt was the culmination of five years of training, and was the first public demonstration, in front of the world's press, of his invention...

Who is the best soldier of all time

Nearly everybody will have played the Top Trumps card game at some point in their lives, pitting sportscars, comic book characters or birds of prey against each other by comparing a series of fundamental, arbitrary (and occasionally pointless) categories, such as 'top speed', 'height' or the ever-dangerous 'fear factor'...

What Happened on my Birthday throughout History?

Something nearly everybody has done at some point in their life is to look what happened on their birthday throughout history. Now, aside from sharing a birthday with ex-England defender Stuart “Psycho” Pearce, very little of interest happened on my birthday in recent history – Dan Archer of The Archers was killed off in 1985, confectionary rationing was ended in 1949 – in fact, I have to go back to 1916 for the only really interesting (to a military historian, at any rate) “On this Day” moment associated with my birthday (but what an anniversary it is!) – the Easter Rising in Ireland....

In Memoriam: Charlton Heston

Last Saturday, Charlton Heston, the star of many of the greatest epics in Hollywood history, passed away at home in Beverly Hills. While his political roles in later life garnered him almost as much attention off-screen as on, it should be for his acting that he will always be remembered and admired...

Osprey's Royal Seal of Approval

One of the nicest parts of working at Osprey is reading the positive reviews of the books upon which you have worked – it’s a really nice feeling to know that the effort you put into a project was really worthwhile. However, I was browsing through some of our older titles recently, and came across one that had a review that stood out...

Building a Field of Glory Army

When it comes to gaming, my usual problem is not being able to settle on an army. In fact, I’m pretty bad at settling on anything – period, rules, figures, scale… Thankfully, with Field of Glory now available, I have carte blanche to bounce from period to period and army to army almost at will, as I can use them all, regardless of the anachronism of the match-up...

Caption Competition Results

Well, the competition results have been collected, collated and considered, and we finally have a winner! The overall standard of the entries was fantastic, and we had much fun going over the suggestions and pulling out the best. So, congratulations to all who entered, and especial congratulations to our top three...

Qin Qin Cheroo

A couple of weekends ago, I had the good fortune to be presented with two tickets to go and see the First Emperor exhibition at the British Museum in London. As many of you will already know, this exhibition displays the famous terracotta warriors discovered in 1974 in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China...

A Forgotten War?

When one traces the major wars in which Great Britain fought during the Age of Reason, the usual progression is English Civil War… Seven Years War/French Indian War… American Revolution… Napoleonic Wars. However, nestled in-between the restoration of the monarchy and the decline of France in the Americas is found a war which had massive repercussions for Europe...

Caption Competition - Win an Angus McBride Print

Whilst clearing out some of the desks in the Osprey offices, we came across a selection of old Angus McBride prints from a sample project that never went ahead. Naturally, Joe and I grabbed most of them, but one survived the frenzy unscathed...

This week I have mostly been watching

Once again, I am quite phenomenally out of date. It turns out that the fantastic new TV show I recently discovered is well into its 3rd season, and has been very well received. Penned by Shawn Ryan (creator of The Shield) and David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross; Wag the Dog) and starring Dennis Haysbert (24’s President Palmer) and Robert “Agent Doggett/T-1000” Patrick, The Unit tells the tale of the 303rd Logistical Studies Group...

Filibuster!

In my perpetual quest for the marginalized and forgotten aspects of military history, I came across a name I had never heard before, but one that turned out to be rather interesting: William Walker, a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Nashville, a sometime doctor, lawyer, journalist, duelist, newspaper editor and owner, one of the most pro-active proponents of the policy of Manifest Destiny and (briefly) President of Nicaragua...

Taking the Peace on the Border

It's not my period (I focused on the Albigensian Crusade at university), but my favourite Osprey book has to be Men-at-Arms 279: The Border Reivers written by Keith Durham and illustrated by the late Angus McBride. It was this book that first ignited my interest in the (mis)adventures of the Borders...