In North Dorset there is a corner of England known as Crichel Down. It was acquired in 1938 by the RAF as a bombing range. Little did anyone believe that this rabbit-infested sheep run would...
‘La France Libre,’ de Gaulle wrote to Jean Marin, who’d been his companion in London from the summer of 1940 and was now the Director of the Agence France-Presse, ‘that...
Books on the theme of society-down-the-ages generally fall into one of two kinds. Either they are a narrative synthesis organised according to some preconceived criterion of historical...
She is today, as the widowed ‘Cory’ Aquino, Time’s widely admired Woman of the Year. But she started life as Corazon Cojuangco, daughter of the wealthy sugar magnate Don Jose...
Classical education is one thing, critical scholarship is another, and in his sketch of the history of Classical education in England, built around a detailed treatment of its three most...
We live at a time when reporters go to foreign countries where there is trouble and come back to write books in which they say that it was hard to make out what was going on. When they say this,...
In most parts of the United States, even those voters who could be numbered among Ronald Reagan’s most enthusiastic supporters removed the ‘Reagan-Bush ’84’ bumper-stickers...
The vast Soviet-bloc intelligence operation in the West is commonly supposed to consist mainly of running illegals, moles and other agents. In fact, the KGB probably spends more of its time...
Art and Power. The connections between the two have come to preoccupy political historians and art historians alike in the last few years. ‘Culture and society’, the slogan of the...
The ‘peasant question’, in some form or other, was one that Russian governments faced for hundreds of years. Although it presented itself in many aspects, the essential problem was...
The Church shall not so expound one place of Scripture that it shall be repugnant to another. Of all the Thirty-Nine Articles, this is perhaps the most difficult, yet it lays down a scholarly...
A new publication by Norman Gash is cause for excitement. His stature among living 19th-century English historians is rivalled only by that of Eric Hobsbawm, and since the two men’s...
‘Eloignez-vous, Monsieur Paisley.’ How many British politicians and functionaries must have echoed the exhortation of the President of the European Parliament on 9 December last year...
Species come and go, but their coming and going remains, we rather think, unremarked by any species but our own. That is one thing which distinguishes us from all the others. Another is that we...
‘For one side of the argument about nuclear energy British Nuclear Fuels urge you to write to this address.’ The exhortation, in 144-point type, fills most of each side of a...
Writing at the end of the Thirties, George Orwell remarked that the British ruling class had decayed so much that the time had come ‘when stuffed shirts like Eden and Halifax could stand...
Since this is such a sad book, let us start with something cheerful. One evening in March 1966, on an assignment to cover the general election campaign in the West Midlands, I found myself at the...
The guidebooks still call Korea ‘the land of the morning calm’. I’d not expected that. I knew that, once, the country had been calm – and archaic, involuted and corrupt...