Philip Ziegler 
Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, by Charles Moore, and Not for Turning, by Robin Harris - review
It is a measure of Lady Thatcher’s standing that her death has been followed not only by the mealy-mouthed compliments from political opponents which are normally forthcoming on such occasions… Read more
'The Undivided Past', by David Cannadine – review
David Cannadine detests generalisations and looks disapprovingly on any attempt to divide humanity into precise categories. The Undivided Past provides a resoundingly dusty answer to any historian rash enough to… Read more
More Lothario than Hamlet
Ronald ‘Trader’ Faulkner is that relative rarity: an unassuming actor. In their memoirs most actors, after the obligatory two or three chapters describing the hardships at the outset of their… Read more
A painless lesson in political history
This book is not a history, explains Ruth Winstone, who has edited this collection of excerpts from diaries published between 1921 and 2011. It is, she says, ‘an impressionist view… Read more
Highbrows and eyebrows
Juliet Nicolson is a member of a literary dynasty second in productivity only to the Pakenhams. She is herself the author of two distinguished volumes of social history describing Britain… Read more
Agreeing to differ
‘Frankie and Johnny were sweethearts; Lordie, how they could love.’ The ballad has many variant versions but the denouement is always the same; he was her man and he did… Read more
Talking tough
This thoughtful, challenging and deeply depressing book takes as its launch pad the Nuremberg Trials, in which the author’s father played so prominent a part. Churchill would have executed the… Read more
Voyages of discovery
Roger Louis is an American professor from the University of Texas at Austin who knows more about the history of the British Empire than any other two academics put together.… Read more
The Diamond Queen by Andrew Marr
‘Of making many books there is no end’, particularly when the subject is Queen Elizabeth II. It is less than ten years since Ben Pimlott and Sarah Bradford independently produced… Read more
At home in the corridors of power
To be the daughter of an enormously powerful man must always be an enthralling if sometimes daunting experience. To be close to that father when, almost single-handed, he is shaping… Read more
Neither Greek nor German
Prince Philip’s childhood was such that he had every right to be emotionally repressed and psychologically disturbed. Prince Philip’s childhood was such that he had every right to be emotionally… Read more
A fate worse than death
Hugo Vickers has already produced a well-documented and balanced biography of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. To follow this with the Duchess of Windsor is as bold a left-and-right as… Read more
In from the cold
Philip Ziegler puts the case for Terence Rattigan, whose centenary is celebrated with numerous revivals of his work After decades in the doldrums, Terence Rattigan seems once more to be… Read more
How we roared!
To most people Christopher Plummer means Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Plummer would not be in the least ashamed by this. A year or so ago he… Read more
The invisible man
Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds’s study of Clement Attlee is a specimen of that now relatively rare but still far from endangered species, the ‘political’ biography. Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds’s study of Clement Attlee is… Read more
Golden youth or electric eel?
Patrick Shaw-Stewart was the cleverest and the most ambitious of the gilded gang of young men who swam in the wake of the not-so-young but perennially youthful Raymond Asquith. Julian… Read more
Casualties of war and peace
John Simpson quotes Humbert Wolfe’s mischievous lampoon but makes it clear that, in spite of the somewhat disobliging title of his book, he does not accept it as fair comment.… Read more
Some sunny day!
In August 1945 Cyril Patmore of the Royal Scots Fusiliers returned on compassionate leave from India. A few weeks earlier his wife had written to confess that she was expecting… Read more
Home thoughts from abroad
This book is companion to a television series (though the times seem slightly out of joint — on the front cover we are told that it is ‘As seen on… Read more
Changed utterly
Some years ago Juliet Nicolson wrote an evocative and enjoyable study of the summer of 1911. She was far too intelligent to be taken in by the vision of unruffled… Read more
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