History must at least be readable if we’re to learn anything from it
Richard Cohen was once one of our foremost book editors as well as being an Olympic sabre champion. Since moving…
How Sunak sunk himself
Whatever his myriad faults and foibles, Boris Johnson has the one essential quality that Napoleon demanded of his generals: luck.…
What Ukraine can teach Britain about patriotism
I live near the small Sussex seaside town of Selsey. It’s the sort of place that gets right up the…
Is Zelensky’s party crackdown his first mistake?
The news that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky has banned eleven opposition parties – including the pro-Russian ‘Opposition – Platform For…
Is Boris channeling Churchill in his response to Russia?
Boris Johnson’s hero – apart from himself – is Winston Churchill, who led Britain through the dark valley of World…
Putin's taste for terror is nothing new
There is tragically nothing new about the scenes of indiscriminate terror unfolding in Ukraine: bombing and shelling unleashed by Putin’s…
Could a Kremlin assassin get to Putin?
Could an assassin kill Putin? Just as the second world war would not have happened without the demonic will and…
Why Ukrainians fear the Russians
The Ukrainian word ‘Holodomor’ meaning ‘death by hunger’ is not as well known in the West as the word ‘Holocaust’…
How Putin is following Hitler’s playbook
Like many rulers of Russia before him, especially Stalin, Vladimir Putin is a keen student of History. Judging by his…
Get well soon, your Majesty
The news that the Queen had tested positive for Covid must have sent a shiver of dread down the spines…
Boris vs the Blob: the real reason John Major can't stand the PM
The embattled denizens of Downing Street must be quaking in their loafers as another incoming missile streaks in. This one…
Are Tory MPs too 'frit' to bin Boris?
Boris Johnson is in the midst of the bleakest period of his premiership, but he can at least nibble on a…
Stalin the intellectual: the dictator cast in a new light
The link between mass-murdering dictators and the gentle occupation of reading and writing books is a curious one, but it…
Robert Harris on Boris Johnson, cancel culture and rehabilitating Chamberlain
Nigel Jones talks to the writer Robert Harris about Blair, Johnson and Polanski, cancel culture and his quest to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain
Any beggar woman was a potential scapegoat during the European witch craze
In the three centuries between 1450 and 1750 in Europe it is estimated that up to 100,000 women were burned,…
Stalin as puppet master: how Uncle Joe manipulated the West
Of the two dictators who began the second world war as allied partners in crime but ended it in combat…
A phoenix from the ashes: 17th-century London reborn
Tragically, the current pandemic lends this sparkling study of London in its most decisive century a grim topicality — for…
How Hitler’s great gamble nearly paid off
Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw…
A stubborn Conservative PM attempting to negotiate with Germany? Not Theresa May but Neville Chamberlain
When lists are compiled of our best and worst prime ministers (before the present incumbent), the two main protagonists of…
Just a man: Demystifying Napoleon
Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent…
Ian Kershaw recounts Europe’s recovery from WWII – have the good times run their course?
When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To…
Wilfred Owen’s troubling obsession with young boys
This year is the centenary of the Armistice to end what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the world’s worst wound’: the first…
A decade of famine and purges: the murderous 1930s under Stalin
He stood five feet seven in his boots — the same height as Napoleon and an inch shorter than Hitler.…
Holidays with Hitler
We don’t usually think of Hitler’s hated henchman Heinrich Himmler, architect of the Holocaust of European Jewry, as a comic…
Burning issues
Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is…
