Month: November 2017

Andrew Roberts’s parallel biography of Napoleon and Wellington, concentrating on the Battle of Waterloo (though the actual battle occupies but a chapter) deals with a number of fascinating subjects, including…

All it takes is a few words and phrases: trenches, barbed wire, mud, water, lost generation. And above all, the Western Front. Because nothing else happened in all those years,…

Early in the afternoon of January 30, 1649, Charles I, who, apparently, insisted on wearing three shirts so he would not shiver from cold, stepped through the window of Whitehall…

As last year’s overwhelming and not always accurate memorials to the outbreak of the First World War slide away into memory, we can start discussing the subject a little more…

Today Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II becomes this country’s longest serving monarch and she is celebrating that day in Scotland, in many ways a very appropriate thing to do. She…

Margaret Thatcher was born Margaret Roberts in Grantham on October 13, 1925 in Grantham. As the second volume of Charles Moore’s biography is being read (though not yet by me…

This, as it happens, came out before the second volume of Charles Moore’s magisterial (the only word one can use) biography and concentrates on just two years of Margaret Thatcher’s…

It is quite extraordinary and can be attributed only to a deliberate amnesia but I can never remember that November 22 is the anniversary not just of the physical assassination…

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on December 30, 1865, the son of John Lockwood Kipling, an artist and teacher of architectural sculpture, and his wife Alice, who was one…

Most readers of this blog would have heard by now of the death of Cecil Parkinson, one of the big beasts of Thatcherite politics in the eighties. He was one…

I have just finished reading Joshua Rubenstein‘s The Last Days of Stalin, a book I can thoroughly recommend to all who are interested in post-war European history. By and large…

At dawn of June 22, 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Union. No, not the invasion of Russia. They moved fast, largely because the Soviet armed forces…

For another project I have been re-reading Edmund Crispin’s detective stories and reading a biography of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin by David Whittle, an enormously charming and talented as well as,…

It is always difficult to work out who can be described as conservative if they are not Conservative and part of the British political scene. Harold Williams, a New Zealander…

October is full of battle anniversaries and this one is extremely important. The history of this country and, let us not mince matters, of Europe changed on October 14, 1066…