‘Why chuck good money after him?’ That was the reaction of my Greek barber, when we were recently discussing the possible restoration of King Constantine: ‘those kings, they just milk the people’. His words caught the gist of the anti-monarchical tradition in Britain, too, as revealed in Frank Prochaska’s crisp and cogent survey of the […]
Susan Bridgen is a rare creature among Tudor historians writing for a general audience. Her style is spare, her manner cool and impersonal. Not for her the luxuriant prose, the passionate engagement with the red-haired monarchs who first gave the English a sense of national pride. Yet out of this quietness she has produced a […]
On 27 June, an extremely rare event took place in central London. The Anglosphere officially took to the stage for a morning of self-aggrandisement. The occasion was the gathering of a panel at the think-tank Policy Exchange to discuss the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, essentially the bedrock of Western defence. Present was an imposing collection […]
Elizabeth I’s second parliament, which met early in 1563, embarked on a busy legislative programme. There was an act reinforcing the royal supremacy, another regulating the navy and the famous Statute of Artificers, which set out the regulative framework for the economy and what we would now call industrial relations. There were also statutes making […]
David Edgerton is a myth-buster extraordinaire. Whether explaining how new technologies did not at once supersede old ones (steamships were slow to overtake clippers) or demonstrating that Britain was more than an industrial match for Germany in 1940 and by no means caught up in a spiral of terminal decline, he overturns long-cherished assumptions about […]
Recovering and identifying the bones of dead kings has been much in the news recently. Richard III’s skeleton was famously rediscovered under a car park in Leicester in 2012, while in 2014 fragments of a skull found buried in front of the high altar at Hyde Abbey were identified as probably belonging to Alfred the Great, or possibly his son Edward
The public apparition known as ‘Sir Roy Strong’ has been created partly by himself (his insistence on wearing those funny hats and drawling his exaggerated likes and dislikes on television) and partly by the satirists. Private Eye early took to calling him Dr Roy Strange, and Craig Brown, the best parodist since Max Beerbohm, has […]
Readers aged over twenty-five will remember what it was like. The gruesome flared suits made from synthetic fibres. The Morris Marinas and Hillman Imps, cars which only started fifty per cent of the time. The fatalistic managements and the bloody-minded shop stewards. ‘Whaddawewan?’ ‘Tenpercent!’ ‘Whendawewannit?’ ‘NOW!’ Britain in the 1970s appeared to be trapped in […]
Sooner or later, nations get the histories they need – different ones, of course, at different times. The early Victorians needed Macaulay’s brash, materialistic Whiggery; their less confident descendants a century later needed the more nuanced version offered by G M Trevelyan. By the same token, the bemused, post-imperial, post-modern citizens of the unravelling British […]
Peter Hitchens’s book is a plangent lament for the old Britain, the land of warm beer and lengthening shadows on the village cricket pitch; but it can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily Express. When Hitchens joined the paper, in 1977, it was still the voice of grumpy suburban reactionaries. Now […]
The term ‘British Asian’ is distinguished from most comparable sociological categories by the extent of its malleability and porosity. Its uses are as many as its abuses. Ziauddin Sardar, a Muslim journalist who grew up in east London and describes himself as ‘a critical polymath’, has undertaken to write a history of the term and […]
It is six years since A N Wilson’s brilliant study of The Victorians appeared, soon followed by After the Victorians. Both books received high praise, and this third volume, bringing the story up to date, has been keenly awaited. Now that the trilogy is complete, it can be said with satisfaction that the verve, erudition […]
If Bonar Law is our unknown prime minister, Jim Callaghan is the most underrated. His years at No 10, between April 1976 and May 1979, are too often regarded as just an interlude between the Wilson and Thatcher eras, or, more broadly, between the hedonism of the Sixties and the capitalism of the Eighties. Yet […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm