It is the fortune, or perhaps the misfortune, of the Enlightenment that its historians frequently write very long books. Franco Venturi’s Settecento Riformatore, which must surely be one of...
The showing of the SDP in the last General Election cannot entirely be explained on the supposition that it enjoyed widespread support from readers of the LRB, but they have as much right as...
A campaigning politician is wise to be ever-alive to the possibility of being set-up and made to look ridiculous. In the light of the Belgrano affair, I do not doubt that I have accumulated a...
In the 1840s, according to Theodore Hoppen’s densely-packed and illuminating study of Irish political realities, ‘bored’ British ministers ‘grappled with the tedious but...
The first televising of the House of Lords, on 23 January was, I found, a pleasant shock. It might well be that the other viewers consisted entirely of the unemployed, but I doubt if even the...
The Second World War is no longer what it used to be. The populists of the New Right, aided and abetted by amateur historians of the mole-hunting variety, have been distorting it into a morality...
Two very different books by two professors at English universities. That written by Professor Ashton is a bad book of a kind that is all too common, that by Professor Scarisbrick is good, perhaps...
‘Yalta’ is not a word that often comes to mind. Ask someone on the bus or try it on the children. Yalta? For anyone living in the eastern part of Europe, the meeting of the Big Three...
As Indira Gandhi’s surviving son Rajiv became Prime Minister, and her body lay in state at Teen Murti House – her father’s home and, before that, the home of the...
There are, one might venture to suggest, two kinds of people: those whose New Year resolution to keep a diary peters out on 5 January, and those who are still hard at it on 31 December. We are...
The two things that everyone knows about Neville Chamberlain are that he was the son of Joseph Chamberlain and that he returned from Munich promising peace for our time. Between these two peaks...
William Shawcross’s The Quality of Mercy is a fascinating, detailed and moving study of the famine that struck Cambodia – or Kampuchea as it is now called – five years ago, and...
Nancy Mitford’s first novel, Highland Fling, is about a young British gentlewoman in the late 1920s, wriggling uneasily but divertingly in the generation gap of her time and class. Her...
The political commitment to an active role for government in managing the economy was largely a post-war development – at least in the Anglo-Saxon world. The retreat from that position, to...
Optimism and wishful thinking have been features of socialist thought from its inception. In Marx, for instance, two main premises appear to be that whatever is desirable is possible, and that...
Jean Carr’s book, Another Story, is about the plight of the wives and mothers of the men who did not return from the Falklands War, or who returned wounded in body or mind. In the telling...
In January 1984, two months into an overtime ban, with the spectre of strike hanging over us, if anyone had asked me, ‘If we strike how long will we be out?’ I certainly would not...
As yet, the Social Democrats have no historian. There have been a few breathless attempts to recall the more obvious events. Roy Jenkins’s memorable (and memorably pronounced) announcement...