Gallipoli
Why was the British army so ill-prepared to fight the second world war?
After 1918, the general staff ceased to focus on who they might have to fight next and how, leading to the abysmal performance of the army in Norway and France in 1940
This fabulous play is like a Chekhov classic: The One Day in the Year reviewed
The One Day In the Year is an Australian drama about the annual commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915.…
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat
Lord Woolton put it best: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the…
Pumped up and dangerous: going to war on drugs
‘Of all civilisation’s occupational categories, that of soldier may be the most conducive to regular drug use.’ The problem with…
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…
The Ottoman empire: the last great casualty of the first world war
In a possibly apocryphal story, Henry Kissinger, while visiting Beijing in 1972 as Nixon’s national security adviser, asked Zhou Enlai,…
Without Gallipoli, we’d have no Page 3
Some years ago I paid a visit to the site of the Gallipoli landings because I was mildly obsessed with…
The other trenches: the Dardanelles, 100 years on
Peter Parker discerns classical allusion amid the horror in two books commemorating the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign
The knives come out of the cabinet in Churchill’s wartime government
Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston…
The Spectator's notes: What shall we call the Country Formerly Known as Britain?
Last week, David Cameron said that we have ‘seven months to save the most extraordinary country in history’. He meant…
