Imagine the scenario. You are a military man who retires at 40. Able-bodied, cushioned by a small army pension and the income from a rural estate in west Wales, you turn your back on soldiering. You remain through and through a sportsman. Across your peaceful acres foxes, badgers and otters carve their busy paths. In
Lance corporal Jay Bateman and Jeff Doherty slumped to the ground. They were killed instantly in the first swarm of bullets from an enemy ambush. Their comrades dragged their bodies along irrigation ditches and across burning fields under intense fire. Rocket-propelled grenades skidded and cartwheeled through the poppy stubble, exploded and showered them in dirt
Eighty years ago this week, the institution in which David Cameron and his closest lieutenants learned their trade was born. The press is fascinated by his membership of the Bullingdon Club, but Cameron owes a thousand times more to the apprenticeship he served in the Conservative Research Department. How dreary those words sound, and how
Rod Liddle says that Gordon Brown’s contrition about the British children tragically deported to Australia is a very Noughties phenomenon — the perfectly pointless non-apology I never knew it was Gordon Brown who sent all those kids off to Australia, packed them off and waved goodbye from the quayside, and now feels terribly bad about
Barack Obama’s increasing disregard for Britain’s views is no way to treat an ally whose troops have fought side by side with America since September 11, says Con Coughlin Washington It says much about Britain’s rapidly disappearing ‘special relationship’ with America that when I happened to mention to some of our senior military officers that
To understand how World Cup bids are won, let me take you to the third-floor suite of Dolder Grand hotel overlooking Lake Zurich. The date is May 2004 and the cast as high-powered as you would expect in any political summit. There was Thabo Mbeki, then president of South Africa, and Nelson Mandela, his predecessor.
Sir John Sawers is not the Downing Street stooge some of the old guard say he is, writes Tim Shipman. And the new head of MI6 may focus the spooks’ gaze on the real enemy The man who brought us The Meaning of Tingo is at it again, closer to home. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s
Justin Marozzi explains why new archaeological finds from Egypt’s Western Desert show that Herodotus deserves his reputation as the Father of History I couldn’t help it. I whooped uncontrollably into my Jordans Country Crisp with strawberries when I heard the news last week, startling my wife and spilling milk and crispy clusters onto a bemused
There’s been a rather wonderful debate bubbling along at the Guardian, about the French minister Pierre Lellouche’s use of the word ‘autistic’ to describe the English Tories. Well, in fact that’s not quite what the debate has been about; everyone is agreed that Lellouche is beyond the pale. The debate has been about whether or
John C. Hulsman says that America’s declining status will ultimately doom its Afghan campaign. Obama must learn from Britain how best to manage the decline of an empire I have just returned from two weeks talking to my friends in the administration and it is horrifyingly apparent that the Obama White House is sleepwalking toward
The ‘poet of the piano’, Murray Perahia, talks to Igor Toronyi-Lalic about being championed by Horowitz, his rise to fame and how his injury taught him what to play Murray Perahia was 17 when Vladimir Horowitz, perhaps the finest pianist of the 20th century, knocked on the door of his family house in the Bronx.
Sarah Standing’s daughter was attacked by a girl gang — but it wasn’t an isolated incident. Female thugs, of the sort who ran riot in the 1970s, are roaming the streets again It was a beautiful balmy evening when my youngest daughter finished school last summer. The A-level results had just arrived, and she was
David Frum on the lessons the Tories can learn from the original conservative moderniser: George W. Bush, whose progressive policies often just didn’t add up Political parties typically undergo a four-stage cycle after a major defeat. It goes something like this: 1. We didn’t really lose. (The other guys just happened to luck into an
In the second part of our investigation into Labour’s dealings with the USSR, Pavel Stroilov reveals the secret Soviet diplomacy behind one leader’s most famous victory Labour leaders, past and present, will be wishing this week that Anatoly Chernyaev had not been such an assiduous diarist. Along with thousands of documents left in the archives
A week after David Cameron ruled out a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, hardly a squeak of protest has been heard from Eurosceptics in his party. It’s not because they have accepted defeat, says Fraser Nelson, but because they are deadly serious about victory Anyone who believed last week’s talk of the death of Tory
Did you know that February in our schools has been designated Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans (sic) History Month? I’d get with it, if I were you, and send your 11-year-old child to school in a gimp mask, with some lube. Good parents make sure their kid is ahead of the curve. You can bet
When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral force. When in 1983 I described Labour’s manifesto as ‘the longest suicide note in history’, I was drawing attention to the party’s apparently irreversible meltdown as an electoral
Power-sharing has not loosened Mugabe’s iron grip, says Ben Freeth, a farmer whose home and livelihood were destroyed by Zanu-PF militants On Sunday 30 August last year, as we drove back from church to our home in Chegutu, northern Zimbabwe, my wife and I spotted a large swirl of white smoke in the distance. We
Sarah Churchwell says the American craze for Amish romance novels — ‘bonnet-rippers’ — is just one part of a strange new fashion for conservatism and abstinence It has been 25 years since Peter Weir’s hit film Witness, in which Harrison Ford plays a policeman who falls in love with an Amish woman while investigating a
‘We are building an advanced socialist society,’ Czechoslovak communists claimed a couple of years before the regime’s collapse in December 1989. What did that mean? I asked Pavel Bratinka the other day. A former leading dissident, a devout Catholic and a physicist by training, from 1993 to 1996 he was deputy foreign minister of his