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Farewell to history?
How safe is our history in this age of budget cuts? And is 'history' as a subject in itself doomed in a digital continually-updated age?
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Origin of “beer and sandwiches”
My friend Michael Ezra asks what seems to be a Google-proof question (and you don’t find many of them these days): Who originally coined the phrase, “Beer and sandwiches at Number 10″? I don’t know,...
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Beer, sandwiches, whisky and cigars
As a coda to Michael Ezra’s search for the origin of the phrase “beer and sandwiches at Number 10″, here is the passage from Harold Wilson’s The Labour Government, 1964-70: A Personal Record, p275-6....
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Last word on beer and sandwiches
Congratulations to Henry Miller, another correspondent of mine, who seems to have traced the first use in print of the phrase “beer and sandwiches … at Number 10″. It was in The Observer on 13 February...
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Rapture of the Deep – Scuba Diving a chapter of History
Scuba diving the German shipwrecks in Orkney offers privileged access to one of the most remarkable chapters of World War One.
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“One of the greatest disasters ever to befall European civilisation”
I thought that I had blogged about this before, but I cannot find it, so I’ll do it again. Zhou Enlai did not say it was “too early to say” what impact the French Revolution had. In the Financial Times...
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The lesson of history: inflation is not today’s danger
The labour rigidities of the late 1960s are a thing of the past, and the hire and fire culture of the early twentieth century is if anything tilted rather too far towards the "rights" of employers...
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History is best viewed from the floor, not the top table
We archaeologists tend to spend most of our lives on our knees – which is not to say we’re a submissive bunch. No, far from it: most of my friends are rather assertive, and if they do fall to their...
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On Balance a Necessary Prime Minister
We were discussing in the office, once again on a Saturday, what the reaction would be to Margaret Thatcher’s death, as we made contingency plans (again) for The Independent on Sunday. I said I thought...
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Thatcher and the Centre Ground
There will be lots of nonsense said and written about Margaret Thatcher this week, but Ed Miliband wins an early prize
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Did the Left Win the 20th Century?
Unexpectedly, this, asked in the New Statesman’s centenary edition, is not a Question To Which The Answer Is No. The New Statesman has used only the last paragraph of my answer, so here is the full...
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Fear of Fridges
Digital data can be amazing. I wrote an article for the New Statesman in the 1980s called “Fear of fridges”, in which I quoted a speech of Hugh Gaitskell’s in which he seemed to blame Labour’s lack of...
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Justin Bieber could teach kids a thing or two about history
When it comes to the thorny question of education, there are plenty of points of view around, with Michael Gove urging more rigour and the teaching unions staunchly opposing his plans.
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Quakers in wartime
On Saturday Quakers inaugurated a memorial, in the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, to peaceable service during and after World War II. The Quaker site lies a ten minute walk away from the...
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Thatcher blew her chance of European reform
If you haven’t the inclination or time to read Charles Moore’s great work on Margaret Thatcher, the budget option is to read the Telegraph serialisation (the best bits from the letters to Muriel and...
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In Praise of Clem
One other footnote from the IEA/Prospect event on “Labour and the Cost of Living” on Monday. Paul Ormerod, economist and author of Why Most Things Fail, had some good statistics. He said that public...
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When Brown feared that Blair wouldn’t go ahead with Iraq
The UK’s participation in the invasion of Iraq was briefly in doubt, nine days before the bombing began, a hesitation that I discuss in the Afterword to the new edition of Tony Blair: Prime Minister,...
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“Tony Blair: on balance a good prime minister”
The new edition of my biography of Tony Blair is published by Faber Finds today. There was an extract from the new Afterword in The Independent on Sunday, which concludes: “On balance, Blair was a good...
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Best Prime Minister We Never Had
Who was the best prime minister we never had? I compiled a Top 10 of candidates last month, but didn’t get round to finishing this post to go with it. I suffer from a triple bias, but my answer is Alan...
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Top 10 Unsung Villains
My “Top 10″ in The Independent on Sunday this week was Unsung Villains – people in history who have not had as bad a press as they deserve. The idea was suggested by Tom Doran, who also nominated Erich...
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