By no stretch of the imagination could A. J. P. Taylor be called a conservative or tory historian. He would have been horrified (or, possibly, amused) by such an idea. A man of the left he was, though how far on the left varied rather.He was very proud of the fact that he was the only invited historian at the Communist organized congress at Wroclaw in 1948 to challenge his hosts about history and its writing. On the other hand, he managed...
Lord Acton, the subject of the previous posting, was a great admirer of Leopold von Ranke. It seems fitting, therefore, that we should now publish what muat have been the latter's most famous comment about history: "You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was." There has been much...
Re-reading some of Lord Acton’s essays on history means reconsidering what one thinks one knows about him. Precisely why do we consider him to be the foremost conservative historian? The man was after all a Liberal MP, a friend of Gladstone’s who eventually made him a peer.He was one of the foremost historians of liberty, even though the proposed tome never saw the light of day and all we are left with is some superbly written and argued...
Today’s anniversary is of an event that might not have looked particularly significant at the time but, in actual fact, began a process that changed the face of politics in this country for ever.The Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden invited editors of national newspapers to 10 Downing Street and led a televised discussion as part of the 1955 electoral campaign.“Sir Anthony was flanked by four ministers: the Chancellor, Rab Butler, the Foreign...
Having conservative correspondents in the United States has enormous advantages. One of them, Lexington Green, who has also commented on the blog, called my attention to a posting he did some years ago on Chicagoboyz.Lex periodically puts together a summary of his most recent reading matter and all of us rush off to the nearest library or second-hand bookshop to find the books he writes about.One of the books he mentions in this posting...
The debate about that will go on for as long as there are historical debates as will the disagreements about Churchill’s post-war premiership. When I posted last month on his resignation, putting forward the opinion that many of Britain’s post-war problems may have been further exacerbated by that government, John Barnes wrote a reply in which he suggested that the comment was less than fair:“I think you are less than fair to Churchill's...
While I have been remiss about keeping the blog as up to date as it ought to be (day job and the need to turn my attention to the forthcoming issue of the Journal – hint to contributors - interfering), there have been some very useful responses and comments on previous postings.As to be expected, John Barnes has made points that are of interest to all of us. I shall pick up his response to the Churchill posting separately, as I should like to see a good discussion on the subject of that great man’s post-war premiership.However,...
In the days after local elections, while people are still mulling over what, if anything, the results might portend, it is worth looking at one of Burke’s famous and famously misquoted paragraphs.How often have we heard that Burke spoke approvingly of “small platoons”? An enquiry on my part as to where that phrase might have come from elicited explanations from two members of the Anglosphere group.The quotation does not speak of “small...
It has been pointed out to me that Nancy Astor was not the first woman MP to be elected, merely the first one to take her seat in the House.The first one was the Irish Republican and socialist Constance Markiewicz, who was elected in December 1918 but refused to swear the oath of allegiance and, therefore, take her seat.I realized that as I was writing the entry but decided not to correct it after it had been posted. It is good to know that our readers are alert to mistakes by the bloggers.In the meantime, here is a quotation...
Not only the first woman MP to take her seat but the first woman Prime Minister in this country and one who undoubtedly left her mark on the whole world was, as every school child knows (or ought to know), a Conservative.Today is the anniversary of Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. Despite Jim Callaghan’s later self-serving account of that day, few of us outside the circle around the lady knew that this would be a mould-breaking government...
One of the myths the Conservative History Journal and this blog are anxious to dispel is the one about women’s advance in politics and society being only because of activity on the left of the political spectrum.The autumn issue of the Journal will be centred on the subject of women in conservative politics. In the meantime, today is a good day to recall the first woman MP, Nancy Astor, who died on May 2, 1946.An American, Nancy Langhorne...
My co-blogger, Iain Dale, has produced a preliminary list of Blair government scandals and is inviting people to write about any one they like. I can’t say I agree with all the ones he lists – some of them are normal behaviour on the part of any government and some, like the money for peerages, is not, in my opinion a scandal.Most of them, however, are corkers. Cherie Blair figures in quite a few, though her husband, believed to be the...
