Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include The Strange Death of Tory England and Churchill’s Shadow.

Efficiency

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 18 December 1980

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.

Letter

Literary Magazines

7 November 1985

SIR: Many of your readers will have smiled at Mr Clive James’s honeyed tribute to the London Review of Books, and also to the late New Review (LRB, 7 November 1985). It was brave of him to write it and brave of you to publish it. The smile was wiped off my own face, however, by the sentence: ‘Grub Street journeymen who could point to no artistic achievement beyond a noseful of burst veins were...
Letter

Dalai Lamu

23 January 1986

SIR: ‘Britain’s problems, Heath declared in the autumn of 1973, were the problems of success’ (Paul Addison in his review of The Writing on the Wall by Phillip Whitehead – LRB, 23 January). But he did not. I’m not sure how this misattribution has entered educated folklore, along with Voltaire supposedly saying that he disagreed with what you said but … or Goering’s appropriation of the...

Short Cuts: Gordon Brown

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 7 June 2007

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...

On Trying to Be Portugal: Zionist Terrorism

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, 6 August 2009

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...

Murder in the Cathedral

Anthony Howard, 7 December 1989

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...

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Painting the map red

William Boyd, 5 September 1985

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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