Jesse Norman

Daily life at the 18th-century Bank of England

3 June 2023 9:00 am

Anne L. Murphy provides a vivid picture of clients, clerks and couriers, pay and perks, cases of fraud and incompetence and the underappreciated threat of fire and violence

Why I can no longer support Boris Johnson

6 June 2022 4:52 pm

Dear Prime Minister, As you know, I have supported you throughout your career in politics: for Mayor of London in…

The Enlightenment was a many-splendoured thing

19 December 2020 9:00 am

History used to be so much easier. There were the Wars of the Roses, then the Reformation, the Civil War,…

My clash with Cameron

11 January 2020 9:00 am

MPs have a standard approach to political biographies, which falls into three phases: first, preliminary gossip about what will or…

Walter Bagehot: the revered Victorian who got almost everything wrong

17 August 2019 9:00 am

Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of…

Adam Smith would have approved of Trump’s trade tariffs

29 September 2018 9:00 am

‘What the hell is going on?’ That anxious wail of economic incomprehension has been heard ever since President Trump decided…

Engraving of John Law in 1720, at the height of his power: adviser to the king of France and controller-general of finance

John Law: the Scottish gambler who rescued France from bankruptcy

8 September 2018 9:00 am

John Law was by any standards a quite remarkable man. At the apogee of his power in 1720, he was…

Spendthrift and slovenly, Thomas Paine was also a scrounger of epic proportions. When invited by a friend to Paris for a week, he ended up staying for five years

Thomas Paine: spendthrift, scrounger and polemicist of genius

10 March 2018 9:00 am

‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Ronald Reagan made this most unconservative of lines…

Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision

27 September 2014 8:00 am

Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…

Edmund Burke (left) and Thomas Paine, caricatured by Gillray and Cruickshank respectively

Where did the Right and the Left come from? 

15 February 2014 9:00 am

What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the…