It is not great literature that tells us how people lived at any time, it is the secondary or what is rather disdainfully referred to as genre version of it. Detective stories are, apart from everything else, a mine of useful information about the past. Then there are non-fiction books devoted to themes such as gardening or, most of all, cookery.
Browsing through the shelves of a second-hand bookshop I came across a copy of Agnes Jekyll's...
While having the usual discussion about Lord Acton - he said "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely - I looked up his notable quotations and found an absolutely splendid one:
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
It comes from his essay The History of Freedom in Antiquity....
Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth Field that brought to end the reign of the Plantagenets and introduced a completely new dynasty which led to other dynasties though none of it can be seen as entirely legitimate. History Today has reprinted an article from 1985 about the actual battle and the various problems that surround it. In fact, as far as TH can make out, next to nothing is known about it.
What seems rather extraordinary is that the author of the article should so easily accept the Tudor myth of Richard...
This picture of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the truly great political writers of modern history, was found on a Facebook site, entitled Federalist Papers. It sums what is wrong with a great deal of modern politics and predicts the failure of liberal constitutionalism in its ability to deal with mass democra...
Without going into the arguments about detective stories being a peculiarly conservative genre, I should just like to quote something I found in a novel by William Morton alias William Blair Morton Ferguson, a man of may talents. In fact, if ever I am called upon to name a true denizen of Grub Street, it would be him, and that is a form of praise, ladies and gentlemen. Here are his achievements in the film industry and here is a partial...
An extraordinary amount of excitement and patriotic fervour was erupting around me as I was reading Peter Whittle’s Being British – What’s Wrong With It?. Team GB (an expression that would have been guaranteed to bring nausea to any right-thinking or, for that matter, left-thinking of the old school person before the vocabulary of Cool Britannia permeated public discourse) was winning medals. All doubts about the pharaonic and overweening arrogance that created the mega-farce of the London Olympics for which we shall be paying...
.... Phyllis Dorothy James, a.k.a. P. D. James, the pre-eminent detective story writer of the day, a. k. a. Baroness James, who sits on the Conservative benches in the House of Lords. Many happy retur...
It is well known to all Wodehouse aficionados, of whom Tory Historian is one, that Bertie Wooster once wrote a column in his Aunt Dahlia's weekly journal, Milady's Boudoir, entitled "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". In the same way this article could be called "What the Well-Read MP is Reading".
In fact, it is called rather prosaically Keith Simpson's Summer Reading List and is a long list of books that Mr Simpson, Chairman of the Conservative History Group, thinks MPs might enjoy reading on their summer hols.
Few...
The death of the man whom many considered to be the finest military historian of our age was announced yesterday. Sir John Keegan, author of several books of great importance, journalist and critic, died at the age of 78 after a long illness. That it was nobly born I can testify to, having met him once and, indeed, sat next to him at dinner. All I can add to the many obituaries that will undoubtedly appear in the next several days is that the man was absolutely charming to talk to. (And yes, I am aware of the fact that many...
Thomas Gainsborough, one of the most English of artists and a man who helped to create an image of England and the English died on August 2, 1788. Here are two self-portraits, one, in the National Portrait Gallery, a straightforward one and the other, in the National Gallery, of the artist and his fami...
