It is ironic but quite likely that, if US-Soviet relations continue to improve, the fear of nuclear weapons spreading to more states will loom ever larger. Partly, this will only be a question of...
The idea of China is elusive. Not only was its civilisation different from those that shaped the West, but it flowed earlier and more continuously – and mutual contact was tenuous. The...
The thing that really got to me after a while was the prostitutes. As I drove back from Cape Town city centre to suburban Mowbray at night along the old Main Road, I would see dozens of them...
Ronald Reagan’s autobiography, Where’s the rest of me?, repeated the question the actor had asked in the movie King’s Row, when he woke up in a hospital bed to discover that his...
During the present century the British political system has undergone three periods of severe stress – of strains so serious that the leaders of all the major parties felt obliged to...
The 15th-century classic of paranoid witch-hunting, Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus Maleficarum, provides a convenient gloss on the word ‘glamour’. Witches, the Dominican...
The last Dakota to fly supplies into Berlin in 1949, at the end of the Soviet road-and-rail blockade of that city, was inscribed with one of those apt Biblical references which the Services...
There was rage and defiance, as well as humiliation, in the remarkable speech broadcast in Ayatollah Khomeini’s name on 20 July. In drinking the poisoned chalice of a truce with Iraq, he...
This is a tale of sickness, corruption and degradation at the highest levels of American economic, social and political life. It makes me ashamed of my country, and terrified for its future. The...
The talks now under way between four of the main protagonists in the Angolan war – Angola, Cuba, South Africa and the United States – may just bring about a settlement. Yet peace...
Iain McCalman has written a major book on a minor subject. It would not be fair to the considerable achievement of Dudley Miles in his life of Francis Place simply to invert this formula: but...
It is only necessary to cite the cases of Gwilym and Megan Lloyd George to show that a politician’s biological heirs are not necessarily the infallible custodians of his or her political...
When something awful or unexpected happens in public affairs, we are usually referred to the ‘cock-up theory of history’. This is preferred by realists to the ‘conspiracy theory...
I began this series of daries with some reflections prompted by a re-reading of Halévy’s volumes on England from 1895 to 1914, and I propose now to end it with some reflections...
The final volume of Martin Gilbert’s Life opens with Churchill celebrating the defeat of Germany in May 1945. He was 70 years old and completely exhausted. Two months later, he led his...
Tom Nairn has, for many years, been pondering the peculiarities of the British state with impressive intelligence and originality. His earlier work, The Break-Up of Britain, remains a landmark...
Dr Searle began by investigating the radical right in Edwardian Britain. He soon decided that the accusations of corruption constantly made by its members deserved serious historical attention:...
Around eight years before the Palestinians began their current uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, a prematurely old Palestinian guerrilla – unshaven, his...