Twee tea towels; tubby Toby jugs; cigar-puffing cosplayers. Churchill’s apotheosis surely ranks among the most odd developments in British cultural life. He has grown so larger-than-life that one in five teens thinks he’s a fictional character. And for some, moist-eyed …
What Donald shares with de Gaulle
A perceptive journalist once said that Donald Trump should be taken “seriously but not literally”. The same could have been said about Charles de Gaulle. On the opening page of his memoirs, he wrote that his “certain idea of France” …
The Conservative Party needs a hero
When the six MPs vying to be Conservative leader were recently asked some quick-fire questions by party HQ, their interrogation was mostly limited to the light-hearted: “What’s the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?” But …
When will we forget the Second World War?
The Second World War is Great Britain’s great daddy issue. It is with us from infancy, squatting immovably as a formative weight and wound. We either resent its example or strive to match it, coughing up Blitz spirit and slapping …
How to fly a Spitfire
The hangar is patriotically dressed with tiny flags and a large resin model of a Sunderland bomber. Miniature pilots in its cockpit have painted smiles. Sensible women are handing out buns and tea. Forties jazz plays; I might be in …
The man who broke Boris
Regardless of what he says, the Prime Minister’s time as a mover of events, rather than a prisoner of them, is up. That fate was inevitable from the moment a young Boris Johnson declared he would be “world king” one …
Britain needed the Falklands War
On the morning of Monday, 5 April 1982, the aircraft carrier Invincible slipped its moorings and eased into Portsmouth Harbour, bound for the South Atlantic. It was barely ten o’clock, yet the shoreline was packed with tens of thousands of …
Vasectomies won’t save the planet
When H. G. Wells imagined the end of the world, he thought of a salt dead sea under a dying sun. His time traveller, having navigated his machine 30 million years into the future, saw this: algal slime, lichenous rocks, …
He was never really ‘Phil the Greek’
Though most people know that Prince Philip was born in Greece and almost immediately exiled, the precise circumstances of this leaving of his native country are surprisingly obscure. How many are aware, for example, that if Ataturk had lost the …