Edmund Burke, who spent most of his life either in the wilderness of Parliamentary opposition or as a champion of lost causes, knew how uncharitably we treat political failure. ‘The conduct...
The last few months have produced a fine crop of books by or about prime ministers: some are biographies, some are diaries and some collections of letters. I have read so many of these books that...
When they heard that Britain was sending troops to recover the Falklands, many in this country were inclined to laugh. Some farcical anti-climax was expected – Anguilla on a wider stage,...
It is hard these days to open the newspapers without seeing a reference to the notion that Nato should improve its conventional defences. One day General Rogers, the Supreme Commander of Nato, is...
It is a nice question whether Britain’s economic institutions or the attempts of economists to explain why they do not tick are in a greater mess. Every now and then, albeit with decreasing...
In discussing the cruelty of the Inquisition, the great historian of rationalism, Lecky, noted the intimate connection between the Medieval Church’s constant contemplation of martyrdom and...
Nicholas Mosley’s parents, Cynthia Curzon and Oswald Mosley, were married in the Chapel Royal, St James’s on 11 May 1920: ‘Cimmie’s wedding dress had a design of green...
The history of the world is no longer the biographies of great men. The Victorians, who needed heroes as an addict needs heroin, enshrined their worthies in multitomed tombs. Letters were...
The SDP is just now at a critical juncture in its career. But then it has been at one critical juncture or another virtually throughout its brief existence. As much as the Labour Party, it has...
In decades of reviewing, I have never yet received three books which I would spontaneously turn into the subject of a single article. How Eisler and Henze hang together need hardly be explained:...
What, we may ask, is greatness anyway? Who in the West this century has shown it? Does it only flourish when nurtured by the ecstatic opiates of war? Greatness, in this context, is what people...
Even to speak of Dark Age economics must raise the eyebrows of a general reader who is accustomed (not unreasonably) to think that the age is called dark because we hardly know about its...
At the end of the last century, a Princeton historian with a taste for politics looked back over the thirty years which had elapsed since Lincoln’s death, surveyed the lacklustre Presidents...
Thursday 27 May. Flight MA 611 from Heathrow to Budapest. The purpose of my visit is to look at Hungarian Book Week. The Budapest Daily News, which I pick up on the plane, carries a short preview...
My fellow members of the Left often seem to have met an entirely different middle class from the one I was brought up in. Left-wing chat about education accepts without challenge the thesis that...
This short book was originally presented as a report to the international consultation held in the Netherlands by the World Council of Churches Programme to Combat Racism in June 1980. It is a...
A Calabrian who now lives in Rome told me a revealing story about the Mafia. An uncle, aged 90, rang up from the ancestral village absolutely furious. ‘Do you know, Vincenzo,’ he...
The novelist, the dramatist and the poet have largely passed the accountant by. How could his dry bones be made to live? Perhaps authors have been right in the past, leaving the service...