The other evening I chaired an event in Edinburgh at which Robert Harris was introducing his splendid new novel, Munich. It’s sure to be a best-seller, deservedly, and Harris has reached a rare and enviable position in which his novels are translated even as he writes them; the German edition of ...
Long before I started writing about politics, I learned one important lesson: What is said to be inevitable doesn’t necessarily happen. Way back in 1965 I read a book by the distinguished American columnist Richard Rovere. I can’t remember the title, but I’ve never forgotten the content. ...
Twenty years or so ago I was doubtful about climate change and global warming. This was partly because I remembered that back in the 1970s we were being threatened with a new ice age. I recall an apocalyptic article in The Times, written, I think, by the editor, William Rees-Mogg himself, which ...
Writing about an international crisis a couple of days before publication risks making you look like a fool—okay, a bigger fool than usual. Politicians, of course, suffer likewise. In the first days of the Norway campaign in 1940, Neville Chamberlain said that Hitler had missed the bus. Well, ...
The young man at the supermarket checkout asked me if I would be watching the fight. “No,” I said, “more a media event than sport.” He wasn’t convinced. He would be paying to watch it, and he was backing Conor McGregor to win. I didn’t say he hadn’t a chance. Strange things can happen ...
“History teaches us no lessons but we insist on trying to learn from it.” That’s the first sentence of a Spectator review of John Bew’s admirable biography of Clement Attlee, Labour’s most successful prime minister. It’s an extraordinary statement. Apply it to your own life. We ...
Few people will speak in favor of slavery now. It’s illegal in every country with any claim to being civilized. I doubt if even the white supremacists who brought violence to Charlottesville, Va., last weekend would wish to reintroduce what was once known as the “peculiar institution.” Indeed ...
Robert Harris’ new novel, Munich, will be published in September. It’s too early to review it, but I’ve read a proof copy and can say it’s as intelligent and gripping as one has come to expect from Harris, while the depictions of Chamberlain and Hitler are brilliant. The novel also raises ...
What I take to be a very well-oiled revolving door has ejected Mr. Scaramucci from the White House before he had properly got in. I’m not, for the moment anyway, concerned with the rapidly changing cast list of the Trump administration, even though one feels that only Groucho, Harpo, and Chico ...
In the first chapter of Shadows of Empire, a novel I wrote twenty years ago, an old shipbuilder and shipping magnate, in conversation with his grandson, my narrator, speaks up in 1906 for Free Trade. "Glasgow," he says, "was built on Free Trade. So was the Empire. ...
