modern history
A written constitution is no defence against authoritarian government
No one can accuse Linda Colley of shying away from big subjects. This one is as big as they come…
The Special Relationship was never very special
I have a book of essays from 1986 by a group of British and American scholars called The Special Relationship.…
The Big Three who ended the Cold War
Historians argue endlessly and pointlessly about the extent to which the human factor rather than brute circumstance determines the course…
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.’…
Why have the Swedes been incapable of finding Olof Palme’s murderer?
Any Swede old enough to remember knows where they were when their prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated. On 28…
It was pretty good for me: Joan Bakewell on the Sixties
For me this book evokes a Gigi duet moment: ‘You wore a gown of gold.’ ‘I was all in blue.’…
How indiscretions over Suez ruined Rab Butler
I bet that you are at best dimly aware of the Progress Trust, and that is what the members of…
Churchill was all in favour of a united Europe — as long as it didn’t include Britain
Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard…
Did the modern world really begin in 1947?
I grew up knowing 1947 as the year of my father’s birth, in a black-and-white faraway time. I was told…
Armageddon averted
From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…
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…
Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger is a masterpiece
I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting…
Is there a way to live without economic growth?
During Japan’s lost decade in the 1990s I found myself handing out rice balls to Tokyo’s homeless on the banks…
