History
Lady Caroline Lamb, by Antonia Fraser
A finely wrought portrait from Antonia Fraser.
History has not been kind to Caroline Lamb. The writer and lover of Lord Byron, who characterised him as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, has generally been dismissed by his biographers, and those of her husband, William Lamb, the future Lord Melbourne, as an...
A Persian Journey
Dorothy Wellesley was a poet, gardener, traveller and heiress - a fascinating and complex woman whose marriage failed after an affair with Vita Sackville-West
A Persian Journey ‘This Persian journey was the best in all my life’. I came across this note in a diary my grandmother Dorothy (‘Dottie’) Wellesley had kept during a trip to Persia in 1927. She added these words nearly twenty-five years later when she was writing her...
Secrets & The Public Interest
The story of Walter Bell, MI6 and MI5 officer.
Secrets & The Public Interest In October 2005, while the late MI6 and MI5 officer Walter Bell’s personal papers were gathering dust , undiscovered in the basement of his London home, the historian Peter Hennessy, in the prestigious annual Cambridge Hinsley...
Those Must Be The Guards
A new book on the Guards takes its title from Sir John Moore, hero of Corunna.
A few words about the title of the book: Those Must Be The Guards. In March 1919 the Guards marched through London as part of the great victory parade. The Times reported rather grandly on the event: ‘A joyous welcome to the Guards ….. fighting through to the end and...
Episode 140
NATO’s Greatest Achievement
NATO's response to the fall of communism has made it the world's most powerful alliance.
NATO’s Greatest Achievement Readers may rightly wonder why NATO, so pre-eminent as Europe’s security foundation, is so timid in its response to Russia’s war on Ukraine. To fully grasp this, we need to look back to NATO’s perhaps greatest achievement, namely its...
Orwell & The Past
D.J. Taylor writes about Orwell’s relationship with the past, and how it influenced Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell & The Past He who controls the past controls the future. Past time in Nineteen Eighty-Four is a shadowy affair, a matter of casual inferences and stray fragments of detail. There may at one point be talk of the nuclear warhead that fell on Colchester during...
Those Must Be The Guards, by Paul de Zulueta and Simon Doughty
The Household Division is given a sincere contemporary review of service over 50 years.
To write the history of one regiment covering the years from 1969 to the current day would be no mean task, but here we have a book covering the seven regiments of the Household Division over this same period. It is indeed a tour de force and compulsive reading for...
