Nowadays there are nearly four hundred members of the Government Economic Service, distributed through the various ministries and departments, with a sizable concentration in the Treasury. It...
Anyone seeking to make sense of British history from the last quarter of the 17th century to the first quarter of the 19th must confront two closely-related questions. How did this small island,...
Edwina had her date with destiny on 10 September 1986. A TV crew were camped outside her house in her Derbyshire constituency, and were shining lights through the windows. Edwina waited for the...
‘You are going much too fast,’ Mrs Thatcher said on the News at One on Friday, 10 November, ‘first Poland, then Hungary, then – er, Czechoslovakia, now Eastern Germany ......
It is remarkable that an essay by a State Department official in the conservative quarterly the National Interest should provoke a storm of debate in the US and be syndicated by papers throughout...
Although Mrs Thatcher and Mr Lawson are closely associated in the public mind, their aspirations are very different. Mrs Thatcher, for her part, is not really interested in the economy at all....
Observers of Soviet politics in recent months might be forgiven for having a sense of déjà vu. The summer began with the first sessions of the Congress of People’s Deputies and...
There comes a time in the lives of most public figures, it seems, when the exhortation of agents and publishers becomes too much to resist and there is nothing for it but to start writing books...
The 215 men appointed by Nicholas II to the State Council, Russia’s highest legislative body, between 1894-1914 comprised the social and ruling élite of the old regime on the eve of...
Intellectuals – informed people who enjoy accumulating and diffusing ideas – were more prominent in Victorian public life than they are today. Public life was then confined to a...
For an economic tract, Hernando de Soto’s book has had a remarkable success. It was first published in Lima, its subject, in 1986, but at once became a best-seller throughout Latin America....
Not long ago, a very distinguished academic reviewer suggested in these pages that one of the troubles with the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock’s leadership was that it was no longer the...
If you want to see the cutting edge of Thatcherism, go to Basingstoke. There, as we learn in Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher, the local council (careful, no doubt, with its ratepayers’...
Southern Britons may be forgiven for thinking that most people in Scotland grew up in cottages among the purple bens, or in tenements dwarfed by shipyard cranes, or in douce villas where grace...
The triumvirate of Attlee, Bevin and Morrison that led Labour through the wartime coalition years and into its most fruitful period of office was representative of the pluralist nature of the...
Considering that they have rejoiced so often in wrapping themselves in the Union Jack, Tory governments have an inglorious record on defence. Churchill’s notorious entry in the index to The...
In the early months of George Bush’s Presidency, before his reassuringly innocuous pronouncements and prudent compromises at the Nato summit had allowed the American media to discover...
One of the ways politics has changed over the last three decades is illustrated by the fact that in 1956 there were only two Jews in the Conservative Parliamentary Party, both of them baronets...