Conservative History Journal

There are a few books that one finishes and the immediate thought is when can I read this again. Mary Russell Mitford's sequence of sketches about her village is one of those. This particular edition, introduced by Margaret Lane and illustrated by Joan Hassell, is about the village. This is important to note as Miss Mitford's sketches were so popular that she found herself writing about many other places in the near and not so near vicinity...

October is full of battle anniversaries and this one is extremely important. The history of this country and, let us not mince matters, of Europe changed on October 14, 1066 when William, Duke of Normandy and his French/Viking army defeated Harold Godwinson and his Anglo-Saxon army. The battle lasted the whole day, which as this article points out, is a long time for mediaeval engagements. Both sides fought valiantly, with the Normans...

Yes, I am talking about the Battle of Lepanto, which took place 445 years ago yesterday. Sorry to have missed the exact anniversary but it is only a semi-significant one. As we can read in the Britannica: "The battle marked the first significant victory for a Christian naval force over a Turkish fleet and the climax of the age of galley warfare in the Mediterranean." The Battle of Salamis may have been as important but others, big though they were, are second-rank. I wrote about its significance before but find it hard...

The Conservative Party's conference this year, as readers of this blog know, is in Birmingham. They were there in 2008 when I wrote about a party conference of an earlier period, in 1880, to be precise, when there was a great battle between some of the grandees one of whom was that scrapper, Lord Randolph Churchill. The story is quite fascinating and puts to pay the notion that somehow politics was a much more gentlemanly affair when...

It is a long time since this blog has had an entry about cookery books and their history. Indeed, it is too long since this blog has had an entry about anything and, really, it is time that was corrected. So, cookery books, their history and the history of food that they describe. Readers (if there are any left) will recall that I find the history of food and historic recipes quite fascinating and often read cookery books and books about...

One could argue that this has little to do with conservative history except that the government of this country in 1939 was Conservative under a Conservative Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain who had to lead the country into war, something that he had tried to avoid. By summer 1939 he knew that was a lost cause but he still tried to win some time and, who knew, perhaps .... Everyone knows about September 1, 1939 when the German army...

In view of my plans to campaign for the publication of the full version of Chips Channon's diaries I have started re-reading them. I have a copy (much used ) of the 1967 version but the 1993 version has no changes, merely a short new introduction by Robert Rhodes James. Though the newly found late diaries are mentioned they are not added as too many people were still alive (actually not that many by 1993 but both Paul Channon and Robert Rhodes James had been scarred by the original reception of the book). The moment one starts...