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.
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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
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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
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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
Over Christmas, president-elect Donald Trump wrote on his Truth Social site that: ‘For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the world, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.’ Trump’s overture, while highly unwelcome to the Danes, is not a new idea. He made the
As the media alarms us about an approaching ‘quad-demic’ of diseases this winter (Covid-19, Flu, RSV, Norovirus) it is a timely moment to think about the travails of our mediaeval forebears. Their common scourges were typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, anthrax, scabies and syphilis – all untreatable at the time. And then there was the plague. The
Yesterday afternoon South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol made the shock TV announcement that he was putting his country under martial law. According to Article 77 of South Korea’s constitution, the People’ Power party President was within his rights. But why? Yoon wheeled out the standard coup trope that he needed ‘to restore order’. He
I had a nasty shock when I switched on my TV on Sunday. It was clearly a propaganda film with hijabed women standing amidst the rubble of their former homes extolling Hezbollah’s victory over the invading forces of Israel. Except it wasn’t a propaganda film; it was a BBC news report from Lebanon highlighting the
