It is received wisdom about referendums that ‘yes’ has an advantage over ‘no’. Alex Salmond didn’t get the wording he wanted for the 2014 Scottish independence...
While he deplored the Soviet regime and wanted all its dirty secrets exposed, there was a jokey, blokey aspect to Robert Conquest, a whiff of the Oxford debating society and student satirical review,...
George H.W. Bush and Arthur Moreau’s activities have remained secret, and, as I learned while reporting on this aspect of history, those who knew of his activities at the time remain sceptical that...
For the last thirty years or more, there has been wide agreement that politics and sound monetary policy are incompatible. If politicians control the money supply, the thinking goes, then...
Brexit has arrived at its witching hour. Seemingly plausible schemes are being conjured out of thin air and every meaningful question has many possible answers, and therefore possibly none. It...
BelgiumSome years ago, a UK tabloid ran a contemptuous article claiming that the majority of Belgians weren’t proud to be Belgian, and that surveys revealed Belgians to be the world’s...
In February 1945 the Soviet people’s commissar for state security, V.N. Merkulov, sent a memo on the status of the Manhattan Project to his boss, Lavrentii Beria, head of the NKVD....
Today, one person in every two hundred in England and Wales is homeless – either sleeping rough or living in temporary accommodation. In London the proportion is even higher: one in 53....
Like Stalin, Harry Truman was a product of the criminal underworld. The Kansas City of his youth was known for its card sharks and conmen. Jesse James was not long dead and the murder rate...
‘The subtlest of insults to Scotland is, it seems, to return to it,’ Neal Ascherson wrote in the Scottish political review Q in 1975. The historian Christopher Harvie described the...
There is a fine Scots word for the sale of the contents of a house, farm or factory: a ‘displenishment’. We have certainly witnessed the displenishment of Great Britain.
Beijing, 1920. A young member of the new Communist Party in China, Zhang Guotao, is discussing revolutionary politics with a Comintern representative dispatched from Moscow. ‘Filled with...
Winston Churchill was the dominant personality on the allied side in the Second World War: not the leader of the most important belligerent, nor even the most influential warlord in the Grand...
On 22 October, Olivette Otele – a scholar of British and French colonialism who teaches at Bath Spa University – became the first black woman to be appointed to a chair in...
Many political scientists were utterly confounded when Trump won the presidency in 2016. A large number had staked their professional reputations on confident predictions that Hillary Clinton...
The pervasiveness of violence among lawmakers will surprise even specialists in 19th-century American history. From the mid-1830s to the outbreak of war in 1861, Joanne Freeman counts more than seventy...
Back in 2004, when he was riding high, before the collapse of the venerable retailer BHS in 2015 and his recent naming in the House of Lords by the Labour peer Peter Hain as a ‘powerful...
The phrase ‘hard-working families’, a staple of New Labour and Conservative rhetoric for about twenty years, fell by the wayside with the political upheavals of Jeremy...