When U Thant retired in 1971 after a decade as secretary-general of the United Nations, he was hailed as ‘Planetary Citizen Number One’. In what he described as ‘the loneliest job in the world’, Thant dedicated himself tirelessly to seeking international peace. He encouraged détente during the Cold War and played a key part in […]
Two of Britain’s most popular political commentators, Iain Dale and Steve Richards, have produced short, quick-fire biographies of Britain’s longest-serving postwar prime ministers, Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. Since Dale and Richards align themselves with the centre-right and centre-left respectively, their books are written in the spirit of the ‘candid friend’. The authors pull few […]
Aneurin Bevan once jibed that the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell was a ‘desiccated calculating machine’. If the observation hinted at a dryness of personality allied to a bent for ruthlessness, then the much-lamented Mr Gaitskell is not the only person in the pantheon of political leaders to merit that description. I found Bevan’s words ringing […]
The diary of a chief whip is a rare thing. Holders of the most shadowy office in Westminster have typically made a vow of silence about their work. In the words of the documentary maker Michael Cockerell, ‘discretion is like the calcium in the bones’ of a whip – or at least it used to […]
Where does power lie within Keir Starmer’s strange government? In the case of other recent administrations, the question of who held power was relatively easy to answer. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown shared it awkwardly and stressfully – their government was close to a duopoly. Follow closely the amicable dance between Cameron and Osborne, with […]
Political memoirs often put one in mind of George Orwell’s essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. For Orwell, clichés and vague language are bad because they conceal the truth. Boris Johnson’s writing is bad in a different way. It makes one think of another Orwell essay, on the ‘extraordinary, artificial, repetitive style’ of the stories […]
Graham Brady was the product of a grammar school. It gave him a good education, helped him go to Durham University and set him on the path to becoming a Conservative MP. Most of all, it gave him a cause. After his election to Parliament in 1997, a time that was then considered to represent […]
Our ruling class has lost its sprezzatura. To Baldassare Castiglione, who coined the word in 1528, this signified ‘the effortless resolution of all difficulties’. At Eton only a few decades ago, the watchword was ‘effortless superiority’. These days, however, it might as well be ‘effortful superiority’. More than ever, the British elite want to convince […]
The event most frequently connected with Herod the Great in popular culture, the Massacre of the Innocents, almost certainly never happened. In his gospel, where the event is described, St Matthew sought to present Jesus as a ‘second Moses’ and so used Herod as a counterpart to the wicked pharaoh of the Exodus story. The evangelist clearly thought that slaughtering all the toddlers in Bethlehem
This study of David Lloyd George’s premiership reveals once again that no more fascinating character, not even Disraeli or Churchill, has presided over the destiny of the nation. Maynard Keynes famously depicted him as ‘this siren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity’. […]
Stephen Alford’s previous books include Burghley, a biography of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s chief adviser, and The Watchers, a study of the Elizabethan spy services, with particular emphasis on the 1570s and 1580s. These were the decades of the Ridolfi Plot, the Throckmorton Plot, the Babington Plot and the Stafford Plot, through which Catholic conspirators […]
The British are great ones for writing about people who might have made better prime ministers than the ones we actually got. In recent years, there have been times when it seemed that Larry, the Downing Street cat, might have been an improvement on the incumbent. Historians have tended to focus on Iain Macleod and […]
Simon McDonald is a former Foreign Office mandarin who nowadays heads a Cambridge college. He was ambassador to Israel and Germany, with a stint advising Gordon Brown on foreign policy in between. In 2015 he became permanent secretary at the Foreign Office and head of the diplomatic service. But it is not as a bureaucratic […]
The youngest member of Margaret Thatcher’s first shadow cabinet, Norman Fowler served in her government for eleven years before entering The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations by becoming the first minister to declare he was leaving politics ‘to spend more time with my family’. He was tempted back into front-line politics, however, by John Major, […]
Marcia Falkender never told her own story. She almost never gave interviews. She never even made a speech, despite spending more than forty years in the House of Lords. She did write two books about her time as Harold Wilson’s political secretary, a job she did from 1956 until well after his dramatic resignation as […]
As an MP for forty storm-tossed years, Frank Field was often an elusive and exasperating public figure. So it is wholly appropriate that he has now written an elusive and exasperating book. Billed by the author as a ‘political memoir’, it is no such thing, at least in the sense that most people would understand […]
The leader of Sinn Féin since 2018, Mary Lou McDonald has achieved for the party a respectability in Irish politics that it never had before. She might conceivably be the next Taoiseach or the powerbroker with whom other parties will have to negotiate a coalition if they want a share of government in Dublin. This […]
In his near half-century as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J Edgar Hoover made the organisation the domestic anchor of American global power, synchronising the crusades against fascism and communism abroad with the preservation of order and hierarchy at home. Beverly Gage, in the first biography of Hoover in nearly three decades, has […]
Simon Kuper’s thesis is that the United Kingdom is being run by a coterie of Oxford-educated friends who were at university at roughly the same time as he was. Many arrived from Eton. They were trained in the debates held at the Oxford Union and the elections held by the university Conservative Association, where dirty […]
There is no more powerful or unpopular government department in the UK than Her Majesty’s Treasury. Whereas some countries divide the roles of finance ministry (raising revenue from taxation and controlling public spending) and economics ministry (seeking to deliver economic growth), the UK locates both responsibilities in one institution. This means that there is a
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Book reviews by Philip Womack
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Juggling balls, dead birds, lottery tickets, hypochondriac journalists. All the makings of an excellent collection. Loved Camille Bordas’s One Sun Only in the latest @Lit_Review
Natalie Perman - Normal People
Natalie Perman: Normal People - One Sun Only by Camille Bordas
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Despite adopting a pseudonym, George Sand lived much of her life in public view.
Lucasta Miller asks whether Sand’s fame has obscured her work.
Lucasta Miller - Life, Work & Adoration
Lucasta Miller: Life, Work & Adoration - Becoming George: The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson
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