Progress is destroying the planet: the rants of a self-hating American
Poverty is increasing and freedom contracting, says Samuel Miller McDonald – and exploitative white Americans, from Abraham Lincoln onwards, are largely to blame
Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history
Some of Peter Watson’s musings on the empire might have been sacrificed for discussions of music and architecture – and the place of George Orwell in the British imagination
Buckingham University’s shameful treatment of Professor Tooley
One of many reasons I felt blessed, seven years ago, to be offered a professorship at the private University of…
Does Kemi Badenoch have a plan?
We are nearing the 50th anniversary, next month, of Margaret Thatcher becoming leader of the Conservative party. Only one other…
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
Change and decay
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…
Grand old man of British music
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s towering position in our national life is now beyond dispute – and can only grow, says Simon Heffer
A festering wound
Just as one is inclined to believe Carlyle’s point that the history of the world is but the biography of…
Dust to dust
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 it is to be English
Referring to the precarious future of the Union of England and Scotland, the authors of Englishness: The Political Force Transforming…
A great public servant
This is a strange but valuable book. The author is a private equity magnate, whose fascination for Richard Burdon Haldane…
The great and the not so good
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…
