From The Spectator, 5 September 1914: LONDON changes day by day, and the London of the first few days of the war lies far in the past, distant for all of us by differently measured aeons of time. The trainloads of troops, the horses, the hurry, the altered railway service, the packed streets, the questioning
‘I’m stuffed.’
‘You’ll have to excuse Meridith, he was raised by wolves.’
‘Gentlemen, shall we join the lardies?’
‘Karl isn’t himself today.’
Tarzan of the vapes
Newton discovers charity
Advice for Cameron Sir: David Cameron once saved my life from a school of Portuguese man o’ war jellyfish, so now’s the time for me to save his political life with this advice: to do nothing. The British people are a fair-minded lot; they will give him another term in office because he and George
In poor taste US Ambassador Matthew Barzun attracted the ire of chefs for complaining that he had been served lamb and potatoes too often since arriving in Britain. Some others who have landed in the oxtail soup after complaining about British food: — At a summit in 2005 former French President Jacques Chirac was said
Home Britain’s terror threat level was raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’ in response to fighting in Iraq and Syria, meaning that an attack on Britain was ‘highly likely’. Three days later, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, in a hesitant statement to the Commons, proposed that: police should be able to seize temporarily at the border
This week’s Nato summit was originally intended to look back on lessons learned from Afghanistan and reflect on the notion that (as Barack Obama put it) a ‘decade of war is now ending’. How naively optimistic that seems now. In the past week a second American journalist has been beheaded in Iraq and the Sunni
Do the Tories think they’ve already lost the election? Their behaviour is certainly beginning to suggest so. In this week’s issue, James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the civil war that is raging in the Conservative party. A party that should be readying itself for victory is now preparing to tear itself apart in opposition.
From The Spectator, 5 September 1914: THE general public is quite excusably befogged by the repeated references in the Press to the financial difficulties which are blocking the way to a general resumption of international trade. The sea has been opened by the power of our Navy, but commerce still hesitates to resume its normal
From ‘The giving up of Louvain to “Military Execution”,’ The Spectator, 5 September 1914: Germany has dealt herself the hardest blow which she has yet suffered in the war. By burning Louvain, killing we know not how many of its inhabitants, and turning the rest (say nearly 40,000 men, women, and children) adrift in the
