The Life Of Robert Loraine

Robert Loraine was born in a niche of time when technology exploded into a world whose keyword was Progress. Both he and his life-long friend George Bernard Shaw believed they were in an evolutionary period of humanity. Born into a theatrical family, he understood its clashes of temperament and competition for the attention of the audience. He was fortunate to be playing in London by age twenty-one, and securing lead roles two years later. Thus, it was incomprehensible to his peers when he volunteered to fight in the Boer War. After his year of service, he heeded his father’s advice; first conquer London, and then America He accepted a contract from Daniel Frohman in New York. Four years of dusty old plots led him to yearn for something new, which he found in Shaw’s Man and Superman. A two year tour in the role of John Tanner led him to professional and financial success. This lust for something new led him beyond the perimeters of the stage into pioneer aviation. Visualizing the aeroplane’s unlimited potential, he challenged the theory that flight could only take place in calm weather by flying through a raging thunderstorm. Ever of a military mind, he also demonstrated the machine’s capacity for scouting at military maneuvers. With political storm clouds closing in again in 1914, Robert volunteered six days before his country declared war on Germany. Dispatched to the Royal Flying Corps, he served all four years of the war, rose to the highest rank of any civilian, and was gravely wounded twice. Robert married at age forty-five, but the compromises of domesticity did not come easily to him. His young wife, Winifred, suffered through the downward spiral of an aging actor. The thirties brought the great depression and he returned to the United States, attempting to make money on Broadway or in Hollywood. Finally able to return to England in November, 1935, he died two days before Christmas.

This short microhistory details the life and death of Eddie McKay, a varsity athlete at Western University, who flew with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War. Graham Broad switches creatively from telling McKay's fascinating story to teaching valuable lessons on how to do history: why the past matters, why historians take different approaches, how to pose historical questions, how to identify relevant source materials, and the importance of thoughtful, intelligent, and respectful treatment of historical subjects. The book includes a timeline of the subject's life, a map of relevant combat areas in the Battle of the Somme, and nine illustrations. It concludes with four unsolved events in McKay's life: a mysterious woman, a strange advertisement for batteries, an empty envelope, and an unknown grave—demonstrating that even a detailed history about one person's life is never really complete.

Bernard Shaw on the American Stage is the first comprehensive study of the production of Bernard Shaw’s plays in America. During his lifetime (1856-1950), Shaw was America’s most popular living playwright; productions of his plays were outnumbered only by Shakespeare. Forty-four of Shaw’s plays were staged in America before his death, eight more posthumously. Eleven of the productions were world premieres. Bernard Shaw on the American Stage tells the story of the fifty-two premieres, which, apart from a few fragments, is his total dramatic oeuvre. The book also includes, again for the first time, production data and concise overviews of dozens of the most notable American revivals of the plays, from the 1890s to the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. Illustrations—production photographs, programmes, theatre buildings, playbills, actors’ studio portraits— inform the study throughout.

“[A] slice of largely-forgotten military history . . . a fascinating exploration of some magnificent men and their flying machines.” —The Sunday Post In the dark days of World War I, when flying machines, radio, and electronics were infant technologies, the first remotely controlled experimental aircraft took to the skies and unmanned radio controlled 40-foot high-speed Motor Torpedo Boats ploughed the seas in Britain. Developed by the British Army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Navy these prototype weapons stemmed from an early form of television demonstrated before the war by Prof. A. M. Low. The remotecontrol systems for these aircraft and boats were invented at RFC Secret Experimental Works commanded by Prof. Low, which was part of the organization of “back-room boys” in the Munitions Inventions Department. These audacious projects led to the hundreds of remotely controlled Queen Bee aerial targets in the 1930s and hence to all the machines that we now call “drones.” Starting well before WWI and, for the lucky ones, extending well beyond it, the lives of Archibald Low and many of his contemporaries were extraordinary as were the times they lived through. They were around for the first epic aircraft flights and with the aid of the very technologies that had enabled the development of drones, they saw air travel transformed from the precarious to the routine. It is astonishing that the origins of the first drones are not common knowledge in Britain and that the achievement of these maverick inventors is not commemorated. “A focused and engaging look at one arena of behind-the-scenes scientific research and the larger-than-life personalities who populated it.” —Booklist