Ferdinand Mount

Here, I think, is Enoch Powell’s abiding legacy: not his undeniable racism, or his cold disregard for the welfare of those he identified as ‘an alien wedge’, but rather the lurking angst he instilled and bequeathed about the future existence of the British nation, the sense of an imminent catastrophe. Boris Johnson excoriates the ‘doomsters’ and ‘gloomsters’. But who was the Father of all Doomsters? Who first implanted the obsessive belief that breaking out of the prison house of Brussels was our only possible salvation?

You can see​ the twin slagheaps from almost every corner of the battlefield. If there is one memorable emblem of the Battle of Loos, it is these double crassiers, a little altered in outline since 1915 but as dominant as ever over the mournful plain. For British soldiers then, the other landmark was the huge pithead lift they nicknamed Tower Bridge, used as an observation post by the...

Thirty seconds​ after he first entered the Jallianwala Bagh, he ordered his men to open fire. There was no word of warning to the crowd, not a gesture. ‘My mind was made up as I came along in my motor car. If my orders were not obeyed, I would open fire immediately.’ After a bit, Sergeant Anderson, General Dyer’s personal bodyguard, ‘noticed that Captain Briggs was...

If you​ are able to name the last four leaders of the United Kingdom Independence Party, then you really ought to get out more. And no, none of them was or is Nigel Farage, although of the ten leaders the party has had in the past ten years, he did fill the post three times. Ukip has been the most successful single-issue movement in England since the suffragettes, but it has been...

Miles Taylor emphasises ‘the agency of the queen’. She was never Melbourne’s puppet, and she did not become Disraeli’s either. In the process, we are made aware of the extreme oddity of Britain’s empire on the subcontinent and the peculiar impact that Victoria herself had on the way things went. She was by turns an evangelical zealot, an enthusiast for the expansion of her empire and a passionate humanitarian. But she was never quiet. In all her mutations she left her own mark on minds and events. It is not too much to say that this strange, self-educated, self-propelled little woman deserves a place among the makers of modern India.