I have finally reached the start of the Thirty Years War in Peter Wilson's The Thirty Years War. The main reason I chose this book over other, shorter, histories of the subject is that Wilson spends the first ~270 pages of the book explaining the broader European context that existed when war broke out in 1618. Since Early Modern Europe isn't exactly my area (more 'my area adjacent') having a crash course in what had been going on from 1550-1618 was really useful for me.

Overall I'm really liking the book. Wilson is a great writer and he has stellar clarity in his prose. That said, the subject matter is almost brain-meltingly complex at times, and there are quite a few characters in it with quite similar names, so it is hard to not feel periodically lost. Also, it's really really long. I'm hoping to finish it before the end of the month, but that is almost certainly unrealistically optimistic.

Finished researching and writing a small article on Robert E. Howard's poem "Arkham" (1931), which originally appeared in a letter Howard sent to Lovecraft - this involved tracking down which of Lovecraft's stories and poems featuring Arkham had been written or published at the point the letter had been sent, where they had been published, what of their content involved Arkham, and - the tricky bit - which of them Howard may have read. That meant combing through Howard and Lovecraft's letters for references to those specific stories/issues, as well as checking for any collateral references (there weren't any, but it was worth a gander).

Next up: continuing my legwork for my next book by going through Lovecraft's Letters to F. Lee Baldwin, Duane W. Rimel, and Nils Frome. Bedtime reading is The Mound-Builders (1930; 2010 reprint edition) by Henry Clyde Shetrone, because Howard and Lovecraft both wrote stories about Native American mounds and mentioned "Mound-builders" in their letters, and I want to see what the popular "state of the art" was around the period.

I've been wondering, do professional historians always write reading notes when they read a book ? What tools do you use ? I've been reading several academic books, but a year or more later I just remember vaguely what it was about, and a few major ideas and some characters names. Is it normal or is it the difference between a professional and an amateur ?

Any recommendations for books about the 1940 Fall of France? I don't want a difficult read but just a book the explains the details of how it all went down.

Which of Margaret Thatcher's autobiographies/memoirs are the best just in your own opinion?

Has anyone read David Stahel's books on the Eastern Front, and can attest the quality of writing? David Glantz is a boss, but the prose often leaves much to be desired, and I'm looking to expand my WWII library.

Just finished Amy Knight's Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant (1993). For those who don't know, Lavrenti Beria was the head of the NKVD (secret police) for Stalin and thus played a major role during the Great Purge of 1937-38 and briefly headed the USSR when Stalin died in March 1953, before being arrested in June of that year and shot in December.

It was a short book, just over 200 pages long, and while it went over the main details of what Beria did and who he interacted with, it felt lacking. There was not much on motivation or personal aspects of him, more a chronological series of events that lacked any context. This may be a consequence of Knight writing when access to the Soviet archives was literally just starting to happen (she notes these difficulties in more than one place), but it leaves the reader wanting to know more. While a good source to read, as the only major biography of Beria out there, it would certainly have been helped if it had waited a few years for some more key materials to emerge from the archives, documents that may have allowed a more comprehensive look at one of the most important figures of the Stalinist era.

This is late, but are there any good histories of gender as it relates to the concept of the warrior and military service vis a vis its role in the definition of masculity? I'm particularly interested in how ways of conceiving of masculinity in martial terms may have changed as armies changed and moved towards modern mass conscription in the French Revolutionary wars.