When the second half of the 19th century began, South Africa was barely even a geographical expression, as Metternich had contemptuously called Italy. It certainly wasn’t a country, but merely an ill-defined area which included two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, two British colonies, the Cape and Natal, and a number
One of Richard Nixon’s salient characteristics was his clumsiness. No one ever called him a man of the Left politically, but in the other figurative sense he was quite unusually gauche or linkisch. By the last grim days of his presidency that might have been explained by the martinis he was downing as if they
When The Spectator recently said goodbye to 56 Doughty Street, we said goodbye to more than three decades of memories. Whatever else we were any good at under Alexander Chancellor’s editorship, we knew how to throw a party, from the great sesquicentennial ball in 1978 to the summer garden parties to the Thursday lunches. Among
When the library of V. S. Pritchett was sold off after his death some years ago, I bought a few books as a mark of homage, among them H. W. Fowler’s A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. I’d possessed other copies, but this was a first edition, and while I was thumbing it idly one
Late in 1951, shortly after Winston Churchill had returned to Down- ing Street, with Sir Anthony Eden back at the Foreign Office also, there was an animated conversation, recorded by Sir Evelyn Shuckburgh of the Foreign Office, who was present. At the end of a bibulous evening, Prime Minister told Foreign Secretary how to deal
‘To my knowledge, in my lifetime three prime ministers have been adulterers,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote in 1963, ‘and almost every Cabinet has had an addict of almost every sexual vice.’ Another pious Christian put it statistically higher: of the 11 prime ministers he had known, Gladstone said, seven had been adulterers. Mark Oaten’s addiction might
In 1945, Europe lay prostrate after the greatest and most terrible war in history. More than 35 million people had been killed, Tony Judt says (other estimates are even higher), with combatant deaths easily outnumbered by civilian; whole countries were starving, scores of cities were razed. That was not what optimistic souls — or maybe
On the morning of 13 August 1985 I was at my desk at the London Evening Standard when Mary Kenny rang; she had left a message the previous evening on my answering machine at home which I had failed to pick up. Shiva Naipaul had held his 40th birthday party in the spring. Less than
Pau, France Until 1981 no American even so much as rode in the Tour de France. Since then an invading fleet has crossed the Atlantic to dominate what was once a European sport, and a race whose very name is its country’s proud standard. First of the Yanks was Greg LeMond, who won the Tour
Not long after Alexander Chancellor had been appointed editor of The Spectator in 1975, and had then lightheartedly or pluckily taken me on to his small crew at Doughty Street, we had lunch at Bertorelli’s with David McEwen and a great friend of his: a man once met not easily forgotten. He was imposing or
When Paul Foot died last July, he was more widely and deeply mourned than any other journalist for years past, apart perhaps from his great friend Auberon Waugh. Born in 1937, he was a contemporary of the gang who founded Private Eye (and whose mortality rate has been frightening: few of the original group made
Somebody once said that the English don’t really like animals, they just dislike children. It was a good line, better than Cyril Connolly’s characteristically over-elaborate ‘Animal-love is the honey of the misanthrope’: our attitude to animals is illogical, deeply hypocritical and too often emotionally false. We ban (or they do) the hunting of wild foxes,
In the scheme of things, it may not greatly matter whether fox-hunting survives in England. We live in a world of woe and suffering, of pestilence, poverty and war, where millions die each year from hunger or violence, where a vast crisis in western Asia threatens to erupt catastrophically. A sense of proportion should tell
Forty years ago today, The Spectator published perhaps the most important and influential article ever to appear in its pages. That is a high standard. R.W. Seton-Watson’s reports before 1914 condemning ethnic oppression may well have led indirectly to the postwar dismemberment of Hungary, for better or worse. And in a leader, headed ‘On the
Six months can be an awfully long time in politics. When I wrote here only last July that the Tories knew in their hearts they could never win an election under Iain Duncan Smith, few of them cared to admit that publicly. Even now, when the Tory coup has an eerie inevitability about it with
One of the paradoxes of our age is that the hereditary principle is in eclipse everywhere except the first great republican democracy. With all our faults, we love our house of peers no more, and there are no longer any political dynasties in England (unless you count Benn) or elsewhere in Europe. But the last
On Saturday, I shall be beside the Eiffel Tower, hoping to see David Millar win the Prologue of the centennial Tour de France. Until last year, I’d long followed the Tour at a distance, but never in person. Then I was asked to write a history of the race, and to cover it for the
When the Crimean war began in 1854, the prime minister was Lord Aberdeen, who carried a deep burden of guilt. Years later he was asked to pay for the rebuilding of a church on his estate, and pleaded King David’s unworthiness: ‘But the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Thou hast shed blood