Labour’s war on the countryside
Two miles from where I am writing, the neighbouring village is plastered with posters demanding ‘Say No to Pylons’. The…
ABC gets that tingling feeling
Does Australia really need an activist public broadcaster?
Edwin Lutyens: the nation’s remembrancer-in-chief
Though much admired for his domestic architecture, Lutyens is perhaps most celebrated for Whitehall’s Cenotaph and the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
After Queen Victoria, the flood
Alwyn Turner draws on popular culture to show how violent protest and unrest followed the old queen’s death, making nonsense of the fabled Edwardian ‘golden summer’
So ancient, so new
Its industrial new towns have nothing in common with its picturesque villages and lonely estuaries – but a refusal to conform still unites this deeply schizophrenic county
Farewell to the Belle Époque
Edward VII’s reign is generally seen as a bright interlude between Victorian primness and the Great War – but there was considerable unrest on many fronts
The Britain Elizabeth II acceded to was barely recognisable within a decade
Steam trains, historic monuments and the family grocer were replaced by motorways, tower blocks and supermarkets. But at least there was humaner legislation
John Major has taken a pounding (1992)
It’s three decades ago this month since the UK government was forced to withdraw the pound from the European Exchange Rate…
Vaughan Williams’s genius is now beyond dispute
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s towering position in our national life is now beyond dispute – and can only grow, says Simon Heffer
How Britain was misled over Europe for 60 years
Just as one is inclined to believe Carlyle’s point that the history of the world is but the biography of…
The coal mining conundrum: why did the NUM fight so hard for its members’ right to suffer underground?
Anyone with a grasp of the history of Britain knows that its once considerable power, and much of its still…
Identity politics is a threat to societies
Identity politics has been weaponised to sow division across the Western world. Global outrage over the killing of George Floyd…
What does it really mean to feel English?
Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming…
R.B. Haldane: a great public servant, much maligned
This is a strange but valuable book. The author is a private equity magnate, whose fascination for Richard Burdon Haldane…
Political biographies to enjoy in lockdown
Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present…
It’s easy to forget how undemocratic Europe was 50 years ago
The subtitle of Simon Reid-Henry’s substantial work indicates its thesis: ‘The remaking of the West since the Cold War, 1971–2017.’…
Diary
When a few months ago my friend Tom Switzer – former editor of this magazine and now director of the…
There’s no place quite like Excellent Essex
Those who think Essex is boring, or a human waste bin into which only the most meretricious people find themselves…
Where is the rise of neo-Nazism around Europe leading?
‘Why would anyone write a historical study of it?’ asks Gavriel Rosenfeld about the Fourth Reich at the start of…
Adam Smith analysed human behaviour, not economics, says Simon Heffer
Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons.…
The best single-volume history of the Great War yet written
The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians…
The 1850s: a dizzying decade of boom and bust
We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and…
A Horrible History of English Hymns
Given that for much of English history the country’s main musical tradition was that connected with the church, it is…
The ‘art’ of stealing presented as English heritage
The publicity blurb about the two unpleasant criminals whom this dismal book romanticises says that they are ‘continuing their ancestors’…
The art of political biography remains in intensive care if Giles Radice’s latest book is anything to go by, says Simon Heffer
With the odd exception — I think principally of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher — the genre of political…
