Winston Churchill
Curry and Modafinil with Winston Churchill
The bar at the Special Forces club has the marvellous rule for newcomers that they should talk to the person…
Premier league
Where will David Cameron rank among Tory prime ministers?
Back-stabbing the old warrior
Coalitions, as David Cameron has discovered, are tricky things to manage. How much more difficult, then, was it for Winston…
Long life
I sometimes try to imagine what it would be like being a political leader. I find this difficult because I…
Punch and Judy politics
With the odd exception — I think principally of Charles Moore’s life of Margaret Thatcher — the genre of political…
Long life
Of all the election promises politicians make in the run-up to a general election the one most certain to remain…
Long life
The gulf in understanding between the old and the young has widened with the news that the young are beginning…
Ten days in May
‘If the war is lost, then it is of no concern to me if the people perish in it.’ Bruno…
Churchill’s charm offensive
In time for the 50th anniversary of Churchill’s death comes this pacy novel about his attempts to persuade the Americans…
Marx men
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
Long life
The Times has given way to the Daily Telegraph as the bastion of the established order, for— with the one…
The only way is Essex
Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations
Palaces for the people
Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to…
Never
He won’t be remembered as Lord Bannside, but Ian Paisley will be remembered for shouting: ‘Never, never, never, never.’ The…
A monumental achievement
Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few…
Keeper of the secrets
Memories of Mary Soames, Churchill’s remarkable daughter
Shouty
Hitler was ‘dark, shouty, moustachioed’ in Churchill’s eyes, or rather, that was Jonathan Rose’s view of how Churchill saw Hitler,…
Politics as Victorian melodrama
The egotistical Churchill may have viewed the second world war as pure theatre, but that was exactly what was needed at the time, says Sam Leith
Keeping up appearances
Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I…
Outfoxed in the desert
What an unedifying affair the war in the North African desert was, at least until November 1942 and the victory…
Soldier, statesman, sovereign
Alan Rush admires the humane, enlightened Faisal I, who fought with T.E. Lawrence and devoted his life to Arab rights, independence and unity
The Spectator’s Notes
The accusation that the Tories have been installing their people in public appointments should evoke only a hollow laugh. They…
Curse you, Sandbrook
Gosh it isn’t half irksome when someone who went to the same school as you but is considerably younger than…
Diplomatic meltdown
In pre-1914 cosmopolitan society, everyone seemed to be related — ambassadors as well as monarchs. But increased militarisation was fast obliterating old family ties, says Jane Ridley
