John Lodwick was a British author"Anglo-Irish, really"who had an adventurous war, to put it mildly, wrote a dozen or so novels, and was killed in a car crash in Spain when he was only 43. A good biography by Geoffrey Elliott has just been published with the title A Forgotten Man. Fair ...
In War and Peace Tolstoy has Russian generals urging the commander in chief Marshal Kutuzov to stand and fight Napoleon instead of continuing to retreat. He refuses. "Patience and Time," he says. "Patience and Time will save Russia." It was better in effect to do nothing than to do ...
It's probable that few of us in the West have much time for either Saudi Arabia or Qatar. There are exceptions, of course. Our governments treat them as useful allies in the disturbed Middle East, Saudi Arabia especially because of its hostility to Iran, Qatar for providing the USA with a huge ...
The word "sovereignty" was bandied about during our E.U. referendum last year, and there were many who said that Edward Heath, the prime minister who took us into what was then the European Economic Community, had lied when he said that this involved no loss of sovereignty. In fact he ...
Drinking was great fun when we were young. There were few things that I enjoyed more. Like Terry Lennox in Raymond Chandler's most booze-sodden"and that's saying something"novel, The Long Goodbye, I loved to be in a bar at opening time when everything was still fresh and full of promise. ...
It's absurd to say that the terrorism sponsored by ISIS and al-Qaeda has nothing to do with Islam. Obviously it has. They tell us this themselves when they speak of their war against the Crusaders (though there hasn"t been a Christian Crusade against Muslim states for centuries), and the ...
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Next year it will be half a century since tennis went open, with the distinction between amateurs and professionals abolished. Previously it was a sport either for the very young or for the rich; now it's one that makes the best players very rich indeed. In the amateur days you had to turn ...
Islamist terrorism is going to be with us for a long time; there will be more atrocities like the one in Manchester last week, and many more just-as-atrocious attacks in Muslim countries, too. You have to be a super-optimist to believe otherwise, or to suppose that there is any quick and sure way ...
Anthony Horowitz, author of the very successful Alex Rider books (teen novels about a schoolboy spy) and the excellent TV series Foyle's War, has landed himself in trouble. His offense? The intention to have a black boy as one of the two heroes of a new novel for teenagers. He has accordingly been ...
William Gladstone, the great Victorian Liberal leader, the most successful electoral politician of the age, believed that success in politics depended on right timing. This was why he often withdrew into silence, hesitating, turning things over in his mind, before coming to a decision and ...
