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How long is a cruise missile? Clearly not long enough to be noted in
this mini homage to military prowess – The Penguin Encyclopedia of Weapons
and Military Technology: From Prehistory to the Present Day by Kenneth Macksey
(Penguin, pp 391, £20). But then if you are taking in stone and clay
‘. . . for fortifications and roads . . . since at least 3000 BC’, giving
Attila the Hun due credit for his exploits in the 5th century AD, devoting
three pages to the evolution of conscription, there’s not much space left
to accommodate the most voracious fact chaser. Macksey is good on personalities,
but weak on technologies; and his prose is often leaden with jargon. In
the entry on radio, he notes: ‘As in so much to do with electronics, technological
improvements followed hot on the heels of each other and in 1904 the heterodyne
principle was first used, a significant refinement’. But, it is difficult
to be uninterested in any testimony to military ingenuity as a whole, even
this one.