Michael Hughes obtained his Doctorate in Economic and Social History from the University of Glasgow in 2016. His life changed when he fully lost his eyesight in 1998. It gave him the opportunity, however, to change direction away from Quality Engineering and to devote more time to collecting military artefacts. He subsequently combined his academic ability and interest in the social life and function of military and political symbols to complete his doctorate and conducted further research resulting in this book. He describes himself as a reformed collector and is doing his best to resist accumulating things.
This is a corner of the technology of the Third Reich that can still be appropriated, when the larger and more complex technology has for the most part disappeared into museums. Hughes has produced an intelligent and detailed account of a materiality that refuses to become merely a part of the past. - Richard Overy, University of Exeter, Technology and Culture