First World War
Patriotic Traitor finds dramatic gold in France’s interwar history
Jonathan Lynn, co-author of Yes Minister, has excavated the history of France during the two world wars and discovered dramatic…
What to do about Syria – the view from 1916
From ‘The future of Syria’, The Spectator, 5 February 1916: We say with all the emphasis at our command, and…
‘Thinking Germans must be depressed indeed’: The Spectator’s predictions for 2016
From ‘The Military Situation’, The Spectator, 1 January 1916: The opening of a new year is a time for taking stock…
How pop is Peter Blake?
Painters and sculptors are highly averse to being labelled. So much so that it seems fairly certain that, if asked,…
Sunset Song is close to masterly
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is the best-remembered title of a short career. Born in 1901, he was dead by…
Ian Rankin’s diary: Paris, ignoring Twitter and understanding evil
After ten days away, I spent last Friday at home alone, catching up on washing, shopping for cat food, answering…
From the archives: the liberty of the battlefield
From ‘Soldiers for the land’, The Spectator, 13 November 1915: It is certain that, when the war is over, tens of…
The secret brilliance of Prince Philip’s ‘gaffes’
I’ve just been on the receiving end of a Prince Philip gaffe, of sorts, and I loved it. It was…
From the archives: W.G. Grace’s legacy on the Western Front
From ‘W.G.’, The Spectator, 30 October 1915: The late Dr. W.G. Grace had become in his lifetime a legend, and he is…
Barometer
The death of Diesel The Volkswagen scandal has brought into question the future of the diesel engine. A century ago…
War, socialist tyranny and the oppression of the handicapped - welcome to the new dance season
If there’s one thing scarcer than hen’s teeth in serious choreography nowadays, it’s a light heart. When was the last…
An Inspector Calls is poisonous, revisionist propaganda - which is why the luvvies love it
What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh is An Inspector Calls. It wasn’t a work with which I was familiar…
What are modern museums really for?
Do we really need museums in the age of Wikipedia and Google? William Cook thinks we do but his children don’t agree
Spectator letters: England’s defining myth, and another forgotten genocide
Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much…
Where Van Gogh learned to paint
William Cook reports from the sooty netherworld that made an artist of Vincent Van Gogh
Standing firm is the price of civilisation. Are we still ready to pay it?
Reading Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, as I have recently, you cannot help but be struck by what a perfectly…
What parenting meant in 1914
‘Not still War and Peace!’ exclaimed my husband on 1 January during the all-day Tolstoy splurge on Radio 4. In reality…
We’re all sulky toddlers now – even when launching space probes
I wonder how long it will be before we actually crawl back into the womb? The average mental age of…
The voices of Indian PoWs captured in the first world war
At six o’clock on 31 May 1916, an Indian soldier who had been captured on the Western Front alongside British…
We know that war is hell. But it doesn’t ever make us stop doing it
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our…
We're still repeating the mistakes of the first world war
The time-honoured saying that England’s great battles have been won on the playing fields of Eton is a lot of…
My ghosts of Athens; a shooting and a royal wedding
Athens This grimy semi-Levantine ancient city has its beauty spots, with childhood memories indelibly attached. There is a turn-of-the-century apartment…
Charles III is made for numbskulls by numbskulls
Suppose Charles were to reign as a meddlesome, self-pitying, indecisive plonker. It’s a thought. It’s now a play, too, by…
It’s not easy for a middle-aged woman to get inside the head of a 12-year-old innkeeper’s son in 1914
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…
The Imperial War Museum finds a deadly place to display first world war masterpieces
The Imperial War Museum has reopened after a major refit and looks pretty dapper, even though it was overrun by…
