Winston Churchill
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…
Be different, be original: that’s what makes a popular politician
I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like being a political leader. I find this difficult because I…
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…
It’s a pointless waste of time for David Cameron to resurrect the hunting debate
Of all the election promises politicians make in the run-up to a general election the one most certain to remain…
The elderly are society’s new baddies
The gulf in understanding between the old and the young has widened with the news that the young are beginning…
The madness of Nazism laid bare
‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno…
Powers of persuasion: how Churchill brought America on side
In time for the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death comes this pacy novel about his attempts to persuade the Americans…
What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
Westminster Abbey was a fitting setting in which to celebrate the life of Winston Churchill’s last child
The Times has given way to the Daily Telegraph as the bastion of the established order, for— with the one…
The only way is Essex University
Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations
Why prefabs really were fab
Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to…
The rhetorical power of ‘never’, from Ian Paisley to King Lear
He won’t be remembered as Lord Bannside, but Ian Paisley will be remembered for shouting: ‘Never, never, never, never.’ The…
The lost Victorian who sculpted Churchill
Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few…
‘Papa told us everything’: Winston Churchill and the remarkable Mary Soames
Memories of Mary Soames, Churchill’s remarkable daughter
Why –y? The evolution of a suffix
Hitler was ‘dark, shouty, moustachioed’ in Churchill’s eyes, or rather, that was Jonathan Rose’s view of how Churchill saw Hitler,…
Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
Lessons from Tina Brown on the art of failing upwards
Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I…
A spectacular faller in the Benghazi stakes
What an unedifying affair the war in the North African desert was, at least until November 1942 and the victory…
The enlightened king of Iraq
Alan Rush admires the humane, enlightened Faisal I, who fought with T.E. Lawrence and devoted his life to Arab rights, independence and unity
The Spectator's Notes: Quangos - a world of perfect hypocrisy
The accusation that the Tories have been installing their people in public appointments should evoke only a hollow laugh. They…
James Delingpole: Is the fight against environmentalism the new Cold War?
Gosh it isn’t half irksome when someone who went to the same school as you but is considerably younger than…
What caused the first world war?
In pre-1914 cosmopolitan society, everyone seemed to be related — ambassadors as well as monarchs. But increased militarisation was fast obliterating old family ties, says Jane Ridley
