Francis Pike is a historian and author of Hirohito’s War, The Pacific War 1941-1945 and Empires at War: A Short History of Modern Asia Since World War II.
45 min listen
First: a look ahead to President Trump’s state visit next week Transatlantic tensions are growing as the row over Peter Mandelson’s role provides an ominous overture to Donald Trump’s state visit next week. Political editor Tim Shipman has the inside scoop on how No. 10 is preparing. Keir Starmer’s aides are braced for turbulence. ‘The
Xi Jinping effectively vanished in July and the first half of August. Some China watchers speculated that his unexplained absence was a sign that he was losing his grip on power. But he has since reappeared and been very visible again. At the end of last month, he visited Tibet, then indulged in a high-profile,
China will celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of the ‘war of resistance against Japanese aggression’ (i.e. what we call VJ day) tomorrow. Given that Japan’s invasion of China started some four years earlier than Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, and cost an estimated 20 to 30 million Chinese lives, this week’s
This weekend, Formula One returns to where it all started 75 years ago: Silverstone. But although the first F1 Grand Prix took place in the UK, the sport was initially dominated by Italian cars and Latin drivers, rather than Brits. Dottore Giuseppe Farina, a lawyer turned racing driver, won that first F1 race in front
42 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Peter Frankopan argues that Israel’s attack on Iran has been planned for years (2:00); just how bad are things for Kemi Badenoch, asks Tim Shipman (13:34); Francis Pike says there are plenty of reasons to believe in ghosts (21:49); Hermione Eyre, wife of Alex Burghart MP, reviews Sarah Vine’s
British politics and ghosts are subjects that rarely meet. Sometimes an MP or parliamentary aide might report a sighting of one of various spirits that inhabit the Palace of Westminster. It is said, for instance, that the ghost of the assassin John Bellingham haunts the Commons lobby at the spot where he gunned down Spencer
47 min listen
OnlyFans is giving the Treasury what it wants – but should we be concerned? ‘OnlyFans,’ writes Louise Perry, ‘is the most profitable content subscription service in the world.’ Yet ‘the vast majority of its content creators make very little from it’. So why are around 4 per cent of young British women selling their wares
Stories about Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, are blowing up on social media. He died in 2002, so why the interest in him now? The weird fact is that Xi Zhongxun is being talked about in the West because he is not being talked about in China. Omission is the perverse way that one learns
Sorry to disappoint antisemites, but Operation Starvation is not an Israeli plan to murder millions of Palestinians; it was a US plan to starve Japan into submission at the end of the Pacific War. However, comparisons with Israel Defence Force’s (IDF) current strategy for defeating Hamas, and the changing legal landscape of warfare since World
While drinking, dancing and laughter were the order of the day in Britain on the VE Day, things were not so hunky dory in Germany. At the liberated Belsen concentration camp situated 65 miles to the south of Hamburg, nurse Joan Rudman cut a depressed and lonely figure. She recalled: ‘One could hardly think of
From a western perspective, memorising all 114 chapters of the Quran might seem an unusual qualification for a national leader. Yet this is a defining feature of the résumé of General Syed Asim Munir, Pakistan’s chief of army staff since November 2022. To become a Hafiz – one who knows by heart the entire Quran
Yesterday evening Indian prime minister Narendra Modi authorised missile strikes on jihadi training camps located in Pakistan’s East Punjab and Pakistani Kashmir. It is retaliation for the attack on Hindu tourists allegedly carried out by the Pakistani Jihadi groups Lashkar-e-Taibi and Jaish-e-Muhammad in Indian controlled Kashmir on 22 April. Does this mean all-out war between
At 7.53 a.m. on Tuesday 30 April 1975, 50 years ago today, Sergeant Juan Valdez boarded a Sea Knight helicopter sent from aircraft carrier USS Midway that had landed a few minutes earlier on the roof of the US embassy in Saigon. He was the last US soldier to be evacuated from Vietnam. As he
This week, jihadist gunmen killed 26 tourists. For some reason Islamist diehards, supported by their stooges in British universities, did not pour onto London’s streets with their heads wrapped in kaffiyeh. I wonder why? Perhaps it was because the tourists killed were Indians not Jews or Caucasians, and the place was Pahalgam, a picturesque village
Boris Berezovsky, the Russian oligarch, was found hanged in his Sunningdale home in March 2013. Born to Ashkenazi Jewish parents, Berezovsky converted to Russian Orthodoxy in 1994. His leap of faith, I suspected, was more political than spiritual. ‘So why,’ I asked him at dinner one evening, ‘do you buy Russian Icons?’ Berezovsky told me
One of my favourite scenes in Kill Bill, Quentin Tarantino’s black comedy martial arts film, is the meeting of Beatrix ‘the Bride’ Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman, with sword-maker Hattori Hanzo at his scruffy sushi bar in Okinawa. Hanzo: What do you want with Hattori Hanzo? Kiddo: I need Japanese steel. Hanzo: Why do you
32 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Owen Matthews argues that Turkish President Erdogan’s position is starting to look shaky (1:19); James Heale examines the new party of the posh: the Lib Dems (7:51); Francis Pike highlights the danger Chinese hypersonic missiles pose to the US navy (13:54); Christian House highlights Norway’s occupation during the Second World
Two weeks ago, a bright light streaked through the night sky above Inner Mongolia. It was not an asteroid. The US Center for Strategic and International Studies, which released the footage, reported that it was China’s testing of a missile travelling at approximately 6,900 miles per hour. When China’s DF-27 hypersonic missile was first revealed
At the end of February, 1945 about 1,000 surviving Japanese soldiers based on Ramree Island off the coast of Arakan, a province in western Burma, fled the onslaught of the British Army commanded by Lt General William Slim. A squadron led by the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth had bombarded Japanese positions on Ramree. The 26th
In 1996, I flew to Dhaka to meet Sheikh Hasina, the newly elected prime minister of Bangladesh, to discuss her economic strategy. It was not a pleasant experience. Hasina was humourless, arrogant and bitter – by a long stretch, the most unlikeable politician I’ve met in the sub-continent. By contrast her diminutive niece, Tulip Siddiq, Labour’s anti-corruption minister who has just resigned over
