All through his short life Shelley loved bizarre happenings and unpredictable human behaviour, so he would have enjoyed himself a lot at Windsor Girls School on 22 June. About a hundred and fifty...
Paul Johnson does not, as they say, need much introduction. Whatever one thinks of his opinions, one has to admire his frenetic energy. From 1955 to 1970 he poured forth strong left-wing views in...
The Iranian revolution of 1978-79 is the most massive popular upheaval to have occurred in a developing country since the Second World War. Within a period of a few months the Middle East’s...
I never thought that Beirut was the Middle Eastern Paris, nor that Lebanon was like Switzerland. This does not make the country’s present agonies any less horrible, or Beirut’s...
In the Economist of 27 May 1978, details were published of a secret report by a Conservative Party policy group on the nationalised industries. Each industry would be allocated a minimum rate of...
For a few days last October the Yorkshire mining village of Grimethorpe appeared to lose its composure. News of Grimethorpe colonised the front pages of the tabloids. It was a strange affair. On...
The history of modern Britain is to a considerable degree the history of the Tory Party, Europe’s – and perhaps the world’s – oldest political party. Or at least the equal...
The arguments about the miners’ strike will go on for a long time yet, as is evident from Richard Hyman’s piece on another page. My own view remains essentially what it was when I...
Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices is a wise, clever, thoughtful book about the danger and the value of various personal vices – cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery and others. Professor Shklar...
According to legend, when Paul Samuel-son left the room after his PhD oral, one of the reputed economists examining him turned to the others and asked: ‘Did we pass?’ A reviewer...
Number ten in the Unwin Critical Library, Peter Makin’s book is very good. No one can say with any confidence that it will attract new readers to Pound ’s immense poem; and in fact...
There are not many historians who matter. Not many whose works have changed the way people see themselves. Of that little list, there is an even smaller number whose works have mattered to those...
For nearly ten years Americans watched – with mingled fascination, horror, anger and incredulity – as the Iranian Revolution transformed a nation once assumed to be firmly moored to...
It is unlikely that the governor of Lubianka gaol has ever boasted to visitors that his notorious dungeons were chosen as the setting for Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But for over...
At an international conference I attended the other day someone spoke of European civilisation as the civilisation of Christendom, the Renaissance and the Welfare State. A somewhat flowery way of...
In Africa the fall of a tyrant does not always presage better times. Worse things have happened in Uganda since the overthrow of Idi Amin – even worse than happened under his regime....
‘It’s not that Ronald Reagan hasn’t got any ideas of his own,’ an American who held high office in the Pentagon under Jimmy Carter remarked recently. ‘The trouble is...
From the Kiev princes to Politburo rule, from the atrocities of the forced Europeanisation introduced by Peter the Great to Stalin’s Sovietisation, and from the Polish invasion of Moscow in...