History

Liberate women…from the rotten dictatorial group-think of ‘feminism’

Good on David Cameron for refusing to wear that hideous T-shirt. Feminists these days spend an awful lot of time telling people what to think and what to wear. It’s easy to forget the heady days of feminism’s innocence, when it lobbied for freedom, the freedom for women to operate telegraphs, for example. The deft fingers of women were to set in action the wires of the telegraph with as much swift dexterity as they do those of the piano. They were to write messages about iron and steel and stocks and shares with the same easy celerity that they corresponded about the last new ribbon or baby’s first tooth.

Save Isis (the dog on Downton Abbey… not the terrorists in Iraq and Syria)

Downton Abbey fans are on high alert that something drastic might be about to happen to the loyal labrador of the house, ‘Isis’. On this week’s episode she was pointed out as looking ‘terribly listless’, with Lord Grantham subsequently agreeing to have the vet check her out. Surely this can’t have anything to do with her name? After all, it would be slightly unfair for poor old Isis to suffer simply because of a misfortune of nomenclature. What has she ever done to deserve an untimely death, save follow Lord Grantham devotedly around Downton? Isis’s predecessor was, after all, named Pharoah, so she continues the pyramidic scheme. If the Downton

What are 16-year-olds supposed to learn by making posters?

My niece, Lara, 15, has a mind like a surgical blade. On any subject, from calculus to The X Factor, she finds the heart of the issue and dissects it with alarming ease. Lara makes mincemeat of homework, trailing A grades, which is why it was so odd to find her stumped two weeks ago. The trouble was with her English language GCSE. As part of her coursework (controlled assessment) she had to comment on a pamphlet, produced by a charity, about volunteering. On the cover of the pamphlet was a slogan in a pink circle, and Lara’s dilemma was this. She said: I’ll get points if I write that

Bourbon from Bush, envy from Nixon… and running into Herbert Hoover: encounters with eight presidents

I feel a bit of a fraud writing about the ‘presidents I knew’, since journalists do not really get to know the great figures they interview or shake hands with. Indeed the relationship between journalist and great personage is about as false as any relationship can be, since each is trying to make use of the other. So in all likelihood my dreamed relationship with President Herbert Hoover — which began and ended in 1933 when I was aged 11 and only lasted for about a minute — came nearer to being a genuine human relationship than all the other journalistic ones later — which included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower,

Keep calm and address Ebola: a brief history of pandemics at The Spectator

Ebola clinics in many parts of West Africa are full, so more and more people are being told to stay at home and take Paracetamol and fluids if they become infected. It means if someone in your family gets Ebola, you all have to stay in the house, which is effectively a death sentence. At the moment, the disease is killing 70 per cent of the people it infects, but that’s likely to go up. People who need other medical treatment can’t get it, and in Sierra Leone 40 per cent of farmland has been abandoned. Western governments are building secure military encampments for health workers, fearing civil unrest and

All is fair in football, war and the former Yugoslavia – even Albanian mini-drones

The whole notion that sport is, like the EU, an alternative to war, took a bit of a battering at the Euro 2016 qualifier in Belgrade’s Partizan stadium last night. The match had to be called off after 40 minutes when a small drone, bearing the flag of greater Albania (with, presumably, the flag of Serbia as an Ottoman province in the corner) flew over everyone’s heads. One of the Serbian players, Stefan Mitrovic, made a grab at it, some Albanian players tried to rescue it and the most fabulous melee ensued. The brother of the Albanian prime minister, Olsi Rama, was initially arrested in the VIP box; I gather he

Clacton to Ukip, Britain’s anti-politics were long in the making

Talking to people in Clacton-on-Sea this week, there was a sense that, as much as they thought there were too many people in Britain, they felt politicians had it too easy. Over and over again people told me that MPs in Westminster didn’t understand working people. Politics is becoming less about policy and more about empathy; voters just don’t want to be ruled by aliens. In a famous article in 1955, Henry Fairlie described the chasm between the aliens and normal people: I have several times suggested that what I call the ‘Establishment’ in this country is today more powerful than ever before. By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean only the

Napoleon’s birthplace feels more Italian than French

Napoleon’s birthplace, Casa Buona-parte, in Ajaccio, Corsica’s capital, is pretty grand. It has high ceilings, generous, silk-lined rooms and a gallery that could double as a mini-ballroom. The house fits Napoleon’s upper-middle-class roots, as the son of a lawyer and Corsica’s representative to the court of Louis XVI. But the odd thing is, the home town of the world’s most famous Frenchman doesn’t feel very French. Corsica is only 14 miles from Sardinia — and 110 miles from the Côte d’Azur. It only became independent from Genoa in the late 18th century and the place names are still a mixture of Italian and the Corsican dialect. Near Bonifacio, road signs

What’s that I hear? Francis Fukuyama back-pedalling frantically

The problem with a futuristic thesis — particularly when summarised by a futuristic title — is that it is likely to be thrown back at you in the future. This is the problem that Francis Fukuyama has faced ever since he published his daring and now much derided book, The End of History and the Last Man, in 1992. In it, Fukuyama argued that history had been buried beneath the rubble of the former Berlin Wall and that the teleological process was now at an end: ‘What we may be witnessing… is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form

Rebellion without a cause: Peter Ackroyd’s curious Civil War

How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s book, the third of what have been announced as six volumes of his History of England, covers the period from the accession of James I in 1603 to the overthrow of his grandson James II in 1688. His priority is established by his title and by the facing portraits of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell on the front cover. He gives proportionately much more space to the conflicts of 1640–60 than to events on either side of them. When the reign of James I and the peaceful portion of Charles

The Matter of Scotland: Try, try and try again.

PG Wodehouse, who was only the twentieth century’s greatest English-language novelist, once remarked that there existed just two ways to write: “One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going right deep down into life and not caring a damn.” I feel something similar about theatre. I can – and do – enjoy a comedy or farce and, blimey, there’s always room for laughter in this – or any other – world. But, in general, I prefer my theatre punishing and draining and liable to leave you exhausted and feeling like the marrow’s been sucked from your bones. I don’t go to

Is America headed for tyranny? It is when the other side’s in charge…

For the last 50 years Americans have been decrying the increase of presidential power whenever the party they oppose is in office.  Republicans hated to see Kennedy and Clinton throwing their weight around, while Democrats deplored the ‘imperial presidency’ of Nixon and Reagan. F.H. Buckley, a Canadian law professor now working in Virginia, explains why presidents have become so powerful. He adds that it’s not just an American problem. Prime ministers in Britain and Canada have also grown more powerful at the expense of their countries’ parliaments, but to a lesser, and less menacing, degree. He argues that American conditions today are very different from those foreseen by the founding

Siberia beyond the Gulag Archipelago

Larger than Europe and the United States combined, Siberia is an enormous swathe of Russia, spanning seven time zones and occuping 77 per cent of the country’s land mass. Ryszard Kapuscinski describes the gulags which were placed there as being amongst the greatest nightmares of the 20th century — and that image of suffering has tarnished the region irrevocably. In her masterful study of Siberia’s people, Janet M. Hartley, professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that this has not only been a place of torture and starvation. While it has certainly endured miserable times, and is likely to suffer many more, it

A lesson of Iraq in 2014: the nation-state is the future

The collapse of some of the Sykes-Picot states in 2014 will spur people to ask which way the world is heading and what it all tells us, just as with the fall of Communism in 1989. After Communism we had at first Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History,which foresaw the triumph of western-style liberal democracy, and then the more prescient, although equally controversial, The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntingdon, which viewed the world as essentially consisting of power blocks centred around ancient civilizational, religious ties. So what does 2014 mean? A clear lesson that the Yazidis and Christian Assyrians have learned is that without a patch of land for

The Spectator at war: A call to arms

Let us say once more what we said as emphatically as we could last week – that the first thing to do is to get Lord Kitchener the five hundred thousand men who he must have to make the country safe. Till that is done, till we have got the men for the firing line, all philanthropic schemes, however good, nay, however essential in themselves, must wait. Sterilized dressings are absolutely necessary, but they must not get in front of the rifles. Therefore, once again, the first duty of ever man between nineteen and thirty is to join Lord Kitchener’s Second Army.  That is his way to help. And the

What has Hezbollah’s Secretary General been reading this summer?

In Britain we seem to be obsessed by what our politicians are reading this summer. It tells us, so we think, about the way they’re thinking or perhaps just what they want us to think they’re thinking. Why don’t we study what other political leaders are interested in? Lebanon’s Daily Star offered us a revealing vision of one regional actor, Hezbollah’s Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. Sitting with Lebanon’s veteran Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, in late July, Nasrallah has a copy of James Barr’s A Line in the Sand in front of him. The book, one of the best researched and most readable studies of the making of the modern

Damian Thompson

Jean-Marie Charles-Roux, a good and holy priest

I am so sorry to hear of the death of Fr Jean-Marie Charles-Roux in Rome at the age of 99. I won’t attempt an obituary, but my memories of him from the late 1980s are still vivid. He was a slender, aristocratic figure who wore a frayed but superbly cut soutane; his long hair was combed backwards in the style of the first Doctor Who, William Hartnell. For many years he was based at the Rosminian church of St Etheldreda’s, Ely Place, where he celebrated only the Tridentine Rite. ‘When the New Mass came in I tried it in English, French, Italian, even in Latin – but it was like

Hitler’s Valkyrie: Unity Mitford at 100

On 8 August 1914, four days after the declaration of war, Unity Valkyrie Mitford was born, the fifth child and fourth daughter of David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, who admired the actress Unity Moore. Grandfather Redesdale suggested Valkyrie, after his friend Wagner’s Norse war-maidens. The fact that Unity Valkyrie had been conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where her father was prospecting for gold, made it all the more portentous. A few weeks after her birth, Unity and her mother (‘Muv’) joined ‘Farve’, who was with his regiment in Newcastle. His quarters were so cramped that Unity was laid to sleep in a drawer. But this was nothing to the

1914 and all that

Yesterday was a chance for people to remember relatives who died in the 1914-1918 conflict, often the only record of their existence being grainy old portraits from a grandmother’s mantelpiece and a gravestone in France. I have no idea what my grandfather did, although he was old enough to be fighting by the end of the war; he was a journalist too so he probably just sat behind a typewriter encouraging others to fight and making stuff up. I do remember as a child hearing about how my great-uncle, Charles Leaf, had suffered terrible shellshock in the trenches. But I only recently read my grandmother’s memoirs, which were published in

4th August 1914 – my grandfather and his brother, aged 20, go to war

This is the second part of Charles Moore’s notes. You can read the first part here. On Tuesday 4 August, NM rang his London house: ‘Roberta our house-maid said that “Master Gilla had got a commission in the Army & Master Alan was to be appointed a surgeon in the navy”.’ Gilla sent a telegram saying ‘sorry cannot return shove off this evening’. NM read and admired the Commons speeches of the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and the moderate Irish nationalist leader John Redmond in the Times. Ethel Portal wired: ‘Ultimatum sent to Germany respect Belgian Neutrality or we declare war at midnight.’ ‘Milicent & I dined,’ wrote NM, ‘a