It is 1979. You are a 15-year-old boy starring in a hit US television show. You’ve seen the crowds of screaming girls outside the gates as you arrive for work, and are therefore very excited to have received your first fan letter. You open it eagerly and begin to read: ‘Dear Mr Rob Lowe, You
If you thought that bust of Lenin you had on your desk as a teenager was the ultimate in radical chic, think on. Infatuated with the French Revolution, Lord Stanhope proclaimed his solidarity at a banquet at White’s Club. Announcing that he was thenceforth to be known as Citizen Stanhope, he ordered the coronets to
Two centuries ago, Edmund Burke famously mocked the intellectuals of revolutionary France for trying to devise a perfectly rational constitution for their country. The Abbé Sieyès, he wrote, had whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions, ready made, ticketed, sorted and numbered, suited to every season and every fancy . . . so that no
Prince Philip’s childhood was such that he had every right to be emotionally repressed and psychologically disturbed. Prince Philip’s childhood was such that he had every right to be emotionally repressed and psychologically disturbed. Born sixth in line to the Greek throne, at the age of 18 months he was hounded from what, in name
Some of the best writing about sport in recent years has been done by journalists who tend their soil, so to speak, in another parish. Peter Oborne’s biography of the Cape Town-born England cricketer Basil D’Oliveira was a deserved prize-winner, and another political scribe, Leo McKinstry, has done justice to Geoffrey Boycott, the Charlton brothers
Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. Christopher Howse describes Spain as ‘the strangest place with which Westerners can easily identify’. He has certainly written one of the strangest books on the country in recent years. His approach is gloriously and provocatively unfashionable. Whereas other authors on Spain
In the patriotic mythology of British arms 1759 may be the one true annus mirabilis, the ‘year of victories’, the year of Minden, Quebec and Quiberon Bay, but has there ever been a year comparable to 1918? In that year 20,000 British soldiers surrendered on a single day, 31 March, and yet within six months
