On 4 September, the night of the Canadian Election, friends of mine were gathered around the live radio-feed listening to the results in Canada House, cackling as the tumbrils bore each Liberal...
J.F.C. Harrison has recently told us ‘about the people who are usually left out of history’ – such people as the maid-of-all-work in 1909 whose duties kept her busy from 6 a.m....
Judged by European standards, the role of intellectuals in the history of the British Labour movement has not been especially distinguished. There are no figures in British Labour history of the...
Set in a radio or TV quiz, the following question would flummox most people, even historians: which future prime minister was one-eighth Indian, present at the fall of the Bastille, a colonel in...
Human beings are very possessive creatures. It is, no doubt, not one of their more admirable characteristics. No one esteems anyone else simply for being possessive, even if they may envy the...
The only really mystifying feature of the Oleg Bitov episode is why such a fuss was made of him. He was not, in Western terms, a big fish at all – except perhaps in his own eyes. If...
Is there anyone who can keep in focus both sides of the debate about armaments, who can see fully what is meant by both armers and disarmers? To the armers, who occupy most of the positions of...
Historians of any society have to learn to be wary of the accepted myths of their subject. Sometimes these bogus visions of the past are deliberately created or fostered by the governing group....
It is often said that the British are obsessively interested in secrecy. It is less often said how deep and peculiar this obsession is, and how much more there is to it than the well-known fact...
The pharmaceutical industry arouses conflicting emotions. Anti-vivisectionists, fringe medical practitioners and food faddists all tend to hate it, while the rest of us are periodically alarmed...
For several years, until he became Labour leader and had to watch his entry more carefully, Neil Kinnock claimed in Who’s Who to be the author of an anthology of the writings and sayings of...
For neo-liberals and neo-socialists, the deepening crisis with which this and other advanced industrial societies have been grappling since the early Seventies is essentially economic – a...
In the sticky heat of the Palace of Westminster, waiting for divisions of the House of Commons at hours when sane men and women are in their beds, I have been perusing Argentina: The Malvinas and...
Grenada has been in the news and the facts about it are more or less known. It is a Caribbean island of 120 square miles with a population of 110,000. Unlike some of the larger West Indian...
As for his secret Spials, which he did employ both at home and abroad, by them to discover what Practices and Conspiracies were against him, surely his Case required it: He had such Moles...
There used to be a type of book known as the ‘Secret History’ of some international problem. With some passion, extensive citation of material, and a somewhat self-regarding manner,...
The present miners’ strike compels an appalled fascination of a kind quite different from that exercised by other industrial disputes. It grips like a thriller. It is partly the question...
The phone rings at 10.15. It’s Mary, from Campaign Atom: the Cruise convoy’s been sighted, fifteen miles from Greenham. It’s on its way back. Everyone on the network who wants...