Geoffrey Wheatcroft 
Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s diary: Peter King, terror hypocrite, and the joys of Longhorns
As we landed at Houston, I suddenly thought of my first visit to America, in 1965 during what we didn’t then call my gap year. Forty-eight years does seem a… Read more
'The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 2005-2008', by Lawrence Goldman - review
Where else would you possibly find George Painter, Jackie Pallo and Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in immediate successive proximity? The incunabulist of the British Museum who emerged from scholarly obscurity with… Read more
Not-so-special relationship
‘Three things of my own are about to burst on the world,’ Dean Acheson wrote to his friend Lady Pamela Berry, the London hostess and wife of Michael Berry, later… Read more
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Looking back, there was a moment right at the start when the coalition government could have asserted its authority, and changed the political weather. As soon as they took office,… Read more
The truest man of letters
In 1969 an author in his early thirties published his first book. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters won the Duff Cooper prize, delighted the reading public,… Read more
Portrait of a singular man
The posthumous publication of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s wartime diaries continues the restoration of his reputation, says Geoffrey Wheatcroft Nothing is more elusive than reputation. A writer’s standing goes up and down… Read more
Parliament shouldn’t pay
This year has seen a sombre centenary, which passed almost unnoticed. It was in August 1911 that Members of Parliament voted to pay themselves for the first time — an… Read more
In England’s hour of triumph, a Pom writes, cricket is a dying game
About 30 years ago, I met Keith Miller. Those who knew Keith won’t be astonished to hear that this wasn’t at Lord’s or any other cricket ground, but at Ascot… Read more
Music in the mountains
Geoffrey Wheatcroft attends Austria’s Schubertiade Unlike all the other supposedly ‘Viennese’ composers — Haydn from Rohrau, Mozart from Salzburg, Beethoven from Bonn — Franz Peter Schubert really did have ‘Wiener… Read more
Immortalised in print
When the great new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was published nearly five years ago — and a truly great achievement it was, despite a few carping critics — the… Read more
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
From London to Bath to Manhattan, ten funerals or memorial services since October makes more than one a month, and attending them can seem a full-time occupation, as well as… Read more
The solitary New York Jew
In a recent review of They Knew They Were Right, Jacob Heilbrunn’s book about the neo-conservatives, Mark Lilla began by asking: How many of you are sick to death of… Read more
Best or worst?
After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history… Read more
The curse of riches
When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely… Read more
Dropping himself in the soup
One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually… Read more
A tale of treachery
When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s… Read more
Fowler’s ‘Modern English Usage’
When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W.… Read more
A lesson still worth learning
Late in 1951, shortly after Winston Churchill had returned to Down- ing Street, with Sir Anthony Eden back at the Foreign Office also, there was an animated conversation, recorded by… Read more
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
‘To my knowledge, in my lifetime three prime ministers have been adulterers,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963, ‘and almost every Cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.’… Read more
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