Some drooping memories of Cambridge before the war have been revived of late by various writings. One is an autobiography, Reading from Left to Right, by a Canadian, Professor H.S. Ferns.1 Few...
You only have to read the torrent of filthy abuse pouring out of this diatribe against sex and men to see that Andrea Dworkin is a sick lady. It’s one long hysterical denunciation of sexual...
In a dingy waiting-room in Sinn Fein’s Falls Road headquarters in Belfast there is a mural of the Maze Prison – Long Kesh, as Republicans call it. Above it are painted the faces of...
It is in poor old times like these that wordsmiths turn their minds to the collective state of the nation. We are driven to ask ourselves who we are, and who is ‘them’, and who is...
Bernard Donoughue records something said by James Callaghan, then Prime Minister, just before the 1979 General Election, as the two men were driving home to Downing Street in the official Rover: ...
If there is a third successive Conservative election victory this summer, Labour will plunge once more into debating its own history. Not reluctantly, because as Kenneth Morgan points out, the...
British attitudes to the intelligence services are governed by two separate obsessions. The discovery of Maclean, Burgess, Philby and Blunt as Soviet agents has produced a long-lasting...
It would be disingenuous of me to pretend that my Conservative-voting mother ever caused me real embarrassment. She came from a line of Lancashire weavers, Liberal, then strong Labour voters....
Let us begin with Kinnock, in order, so to speak, to get him out of the way. If one’s view is that Neil Kinnock is a good man in a position made impossible by historical developments, one...
‘It is only by accident that I am whirling in the maelstrom of history,’ Rosa Luxemburg wrote from prison in September 1915; ‘actually I was born to tend geese.’ The subject...
The last decade has quite obviously been a painful one economically. The persistent stagflation of the Seventies reversed the favourable terms of the post-war expansion of welfare states. Instead...
Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then...
The latest volume of Martin Gilbert’s Churchill biography is the fifth he has published since taking up the task in 1968. This time he accompanies Churchill on the long march from the...
As the Labour Party continues to unravel, it becomes more and more obvious that the follies and misadventures which have plagued it during the last few months can be understood only against the...
The ostensible reason for the enormous concern in America over the Irangate affair has been the question of whether the President and his National Security Council, together with the CIA and...
This anatomy of the membership of the House of Commons is the sixth such work to issue from the History of Parliament Trust. Previous volumes in the series have covered the years 1509 to 1603,...
Which is the more subversive: a group of senior people in the security services who are giving secrets to the enemy, or a group of senior people in the security services who are working...
The Great War of 1914-1918 is at last a respectable field of study for British professional historians. There has been no lack of monographs on specialised aspects of that gigantic tragedy: what...