Winston Churchill

Chico, Harpo and Groucho Marx (left to right) enjoy a day at the races

What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers

10 January 2015 9:00 am

Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers

Westminster Abbey was a fitting setting in which to celebrate the life of Winston Churchill’s last child

29 November 2014 9:00 am

The Times has given way to the Daily Telegraph as the bastion of the established order, for— with the one…

The many faces of Essex: it was the architects’ intention to create ‘Something Fierce’ — a designed environment that was actively stimulating. ALL PHOTOGRAPHS FROM ESSEX UNIVERSITY'S 50TH ANNIVERSARY BROCHURE

The only way is Essex University

1 November 2014 9:00 am

Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations

Grade II-listed Phoenix prefabs in Moseley, Birmingham

Why prefabs really were fab

18 October 2014 9:00 am

Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to…

The rhetorical power of ‘never’, from Ian Paisley to King Lear

20 September 2014 9:00 am

He won’t be remembered as Lord Bannside, but Ian Paisley will be remembered for shouting: ‘Never, never, never, never.’ The…

‘While some observers were impressed, others felt the depiction of a doddery Churchill propped up on a walking stick unbecoming’

The lost Victorian who sculpted Churchill

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few…

Mary and Papa, Downing Street, July 1942

‘Papa told us everything’: Winston Churchill and the remarkable Mary Soames

7 June 2014 9:00 am

Memories of Mary Soames, Churchill’s remarkable daughter

Why –y? The evolution of a suffix

3 May 2014 9:00 am

Hitler was ‘dark, shouty, moustachioed’ in Churchill’s eyes, or rather, that was Jonathan Rose’s view of how Churchill saw Hitler,…

Churchill reading in his library at Chartwell

Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful

19 April 2014 9:00 am

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

Lessons from Tina Brown on the art of failing upwards

29 March 2014 9:00 am

Shortly after I started working at Vanity Fair in the mid-1990s, I suggested to my boss Graydon Carter that I…

A German soldier in the Western Desert in 1942 scans the horizon for enemy movements

A spectacular faller in the Benghazi stakes

1 March 2014 9:00 am

What an unedifying affair the war in the North African desert was, at least until November 1942 and the victory…

Faisal’s dark, liquid eyes and distinguished bearing caused a sensation at the Paris Peace Conference

The enlightened king of Iraq

15 February 2014 9:00 am

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: Quangos - a world of perfect hypocrisy

8 February 2014 9:00 am

The accusation that the Tories have been installing their people in public appointments should evoke only a hollow laugh. They…

James Delingpole: Is the fight against environmentalism the new Cold War?

16 November 2013 9:00 am

Gosh it isn’t half irksome when someone who went to the same school as you but is considerably younger than…

Cat fight: tension mounts between the Great Powers in 1905 as Edward VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé, squabble over Morocco

What caused the first world war?

12 October 2013 9:00 am

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