Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Strange Death of Tory England and Churchill’s Shadow.
Why should the conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinians absorb the attention of the world, as it does? It makes no sense when you look objectively at the Holy Land (a convenient term to describe the territory between Jordan and the sea: British Mandatory Palestine from 1920 to 1948 and controlled by Israel one way or another since 1967), which is about the size of New...
Why do politicians write books? Sometimes money is the simple answer. Disraeli and Churchill were both scribbling before they entered Parliament, and Churchill ended with more than one small fortune through some startling and, on occasion, clandestine publishing and movie contracts, as David Reynolds has shown in his riveting In Command of History.
Then there is self-justification after...
Nations rise and fall: some which were once great no longer are – Sweden, say, or Holland – while Russia, which wasn’t, now is. Sometimes countries – the United States or Israel – arise from nothing. But the subject of Mr Haffner’s book is odder. It first appeared from nowhere and then disappeared quite without trace: to him, a sad disappearance.
The most revealing moment at the recent meeting of the Church of England’s General Synod occurred during an impromptu speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Dr Robert Runcie was speaking...
The story of the South African gold and diamond fields and of the men who rose to wealth and notoriety as a result of their exploitation has stimulated writers since the 1870s, when diamonds were...
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