Society

At the end of the second world war, George Orwell went to an event organised by PEN, a campaign dedicated to defending freedom of expression. He walked into a scene we encounter everywhere in 2022. The meeting was meant to celebrate the tercentenary of John Milton’s Areopagitica, one of the earliest and still one of the best defences of freedom of thought in the English language. Institutions are not censoring because they are true believers but because they are frightened Journalists, novelists and poets depend on that right. They should know that, if they lose it, they lose their soul. Milton’s cry from the 1640s should be their cry: ‘I cannot

This week marks the 81st anniversary of the Japanese attack on the US fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, which launched the start of the Pacific War and turned what had hitherto been a European war into a world conflict. The air attack by 353 Japanese warplanes on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor was led by flight Lt Commander Mitsuo Fuchida. His later conversion to Christian evangelism was one of the peculiar outcomes of this seminal event in 20th Century history.  In the summer of 1984, I was on a small car ferry taking me from Matsuyama, a city on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s major four islands, to Hiroshima,

The popular historian Ben Macintyre is a fortunate fellow. No sooner has the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of his account of the SAS’s wartime birth Rogue Heroes wrapped up, than on 8 December ITV launches an equally lavish drama series, A Spy Among Friends based on another of his bestsellers – the story of Soviet super spy and arch traitor Harold ‘Kim’ Philby. The difficulty with parachuting fictional women into the stories of mid 20th century war and spycraft though is that their presence would have changed everything Both series largely stick to the facts meticulously recorded by Macintyre and feature real historical figures. Rogue Heroes is populated by square jawed