Ed West writes the Wrong Side of History substack
Two books I read in my teens made me want to be a writer. One, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, appeared when I was in the third year of secondary school and delivered a style of memoir so warm, so funny and affable that I wanted nothing more than to do the same. The other was Harper
In May 1940, days after the Dunkirk evacuation, the Churchill defender Andreas Koureas recalls how the great British war leader was, ‘informed by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, of more dreadful news. Roosevelt had no faith in Churchill nor Britain, and wanted Canada to give up on her. Roosevelt thought that Britain would likely
Diaspora politics is a funny old thing, a form of loyalty that is often coloured by nostalgia and deeply unconnected with the reality back home. It can be especially prickly but also amusing. The growth of ‘cultural appropriation’ as a concept was often driven by third generation East Asians in North America who had assimilated
I visited Mycenae for the first time this autumn. While the ruins of classical Athens can seem almost familiar, the ancient hillfort of a millennia earlier truly feels as though it belongs to the world of gods and heroes, of Homer and the Trojan War. If my imagination hadn’t been destroyed by decades of television,
I took my daughter to Athens for a short holiday at half-term. She is studying Ancient Greek at GCSE, which makes me immensely proud as I didn’t even get that far with Latin. Delphi was wondrous but Mycenae was perhaps the most powerful: there is something about the place, as if one might close one’s
We went to Skye last year on a family holiday – an amazing island, beautiful scenery, so many great people. Towards the end of our trip we visited Dunvegan Castle, ancestral home of the mighty Clan MacLeod. It featured much about the history of the family and its famous sons and daughters, although I noticed that
A few years ago, a conspiracy theory was born, based on the idea that the population of Britain was far larger than the government claimed. This was known to be true because receipts from Tesco, the country’s largest supermarket, gave an indication of how many people were buying everyday necessities, and these sales were too
Donald Trump is arguably the most unsuitable candidate of any major western political party in living memory, let alone leader of its most powerful state. Brazenly dishonest at times, fond of extreme and reckless rhetoric and disdainful of most political conventions, he’s also the funniest politician in decades. The two things are not unconnected. Comedy
If there is one thing that can be said about Elon Musk, whether you like him or not, he is certainly an argument for the great man theory of history. Rather than the human story just being just a series of social forces pushing us like waves, a single individual can steer events in a
My father did National Service and was lucky enough to end up in Trieste, which was probably the best posting around. He was assigned to the intelligence corps, his job to track down former members of the Croatian Ustaše, a pro-Nazi collaboration regime known for bloodthirstiness so extreme that even visiting Gestapo were shocked by their inhumanity.
My brand is pessimism so I’m wary of flogging it to death or becoming a parody of myself, but it’s hard not to feel a bit downcast about the direction of the country. Perhaps it’s just been an especially grim couple of weeks for Britain, with riots in Leeds, a soldier stabbed in Kent and
I’m old enough to remember the sense of optimism, hope and promise felt when Tony Blair was elected back in 1997; not by me, obviously, but I could at least appreciate that other people felt that ‘things can only get better’. Whether you think they did or not, Blair transformed the country in his own
Sea-thieves messenger, deliver back in reply,tell your people this spiteful message,that here stands undaunted an Earl with his band of menwho will defend our homeland,Aethelred’s country, the lord of mypeople and land. Fall shall youheathen in battle! To us it would be shamefulthat you with our coin to your ships should get awaywithout a fight,
I’m old enough to remember when ‘it’s a free country’ was a phrase people used in conversation. It feels like it was the kind of thing they said regularly, either when someone asked permission to do something or when commenting on some particular eccentricity. Can I sit there? It’s a free country. You want to
One of Professor Richard Dawkins’s most influential ideas was the concept of the ‘meme’, which he coined in The Selfish Gene. A meme is an idea or form of behaviour that spreads by imitation from person to person. Memes can be beneficial or harmful to the individual and the wider community. The most successful have
Western liberalism was built on the principle of marrying out. Our beliefs about the freedom of the individual ultimately stem from the Catholic Church’s ban on cousin marriage, which helped create a worldview that was open, trusting and opposed to both clannishness and xenophobia. The medieval Church’s insistence that marriage be consensual was revolutionary and strange;
‘We – conservatives of left and right, all those who believe in the old way – need to win this battle, to restore the conservative normative as the proper basis for our culture and society, with a restored “covenantal” understanding at the heart of families, neighbourhoods and the nation.’ So the MP Danny Kruger writes
I love the BBC’s Horrible Histories; in fact, I’m on record as saying it’s among the best things about being a parent. The show, which in its first five seasons starred the six actors who went on to make Ghosts, has engaged children and adults alike with a dry wit that owes much to Blackadder. Go and have
My dog is great with children, I will give her that. The family pet and I don’t really get on, and since I last wrote on the subject of ‘Twiggy’ I’m afraid there has been no great budding human–canine love story; I won’t be played by Owen Wilson in the biopic of her life any
Seven years ago on Friday, a 31-year-old man got behind the wheel of a 19-tonne lorry and purposefully drove it down Nice’s Promenade des Anglais at speed as crowds celebrated France’s Bastille Day. Eighty-six people were killed, including 14 children, the image of an infant’s corpse wrapped in foil beside a toy shocking a country
