How Britain’s European Future was Compromised

Posted on by David Gelber

This year’s Conservative Party Conference at Blackpool resembled a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous or a gathering of the pre-war Oxford Group, when participants made public confessions of their sins to all their fellow members. Former Ministers queued up to confess to faults of harshness, intolerance, sleaze and all the other political sins. There was one […]

Lest We Forget

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

What will they say of Hitler long after we are all dead? This is the unspoken question behind the American conservative intellectual John Lukacs’s excellent book. While there are still people alive who lost family members to Hitler’s war, while we still live in a world whose political contours were largely shaped by the post–Hitler […]

Emperor’s New Clothes

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

When I was a boy growing up in China in the years after the Second World War, I knew a young Chinese man who had fought as a partisan against the Japanese occupying forces in Hong Kong. Not surprisingly, he was vehemently anti–Japanese. Furthermore, he was utterly convinced that the Japanese army had been personally […]

They Got It All Wrong

Posted on by Jonathan Beckman

In January 1946, having closed down the Office of Strategic Services, America’s wartime intelligence arm, President Harry Truman threw a jolly lunch party at the White House for its successor. The new National Intelligence Authority comprised the secretaries of state, war and the Navy, with Admiral Sidney Souers as the new Director of Central Intelligence. […]

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