Conservative History Journal

... to all the many tens of thousands of words that have been written about the Iron Duke, the general who led the armies to victory at Waterloo, the man whose bon mots most of us can quote: the Duke of Wellington (1769 -1852).Although there is some doubt about the exact day of his birth and the BBC prefers the old and extremely inexact information of "early in May", historians now tend to agree that it was April 29. So, let us celebrate...

Tory Historian missed this anniversary by less than half an hour but it is still worth mentioning as a remarkable event in British history. One hundred years ago yesterday, April 27, 1909, a number of suffragettes chained themselves to the statues in St Stephen's Hall in the Palace of Westminster. (Hmm, those were the days when, despite the fear of Fenian outrages, access to the Palace was unrestricted.)The documents related to the event...

Tory Historian walked down the Aldwych today from Bush House towards the Strand and Trafalgar Square (eat you heart out Burlington Bertie) and managed to miss the St George's Day celebrations, which was no great tragedy as Tory Historian dislikes state sponsored jollification.The route went past the memorial to Eagle Hut, carefully photographed, that is in the wall of Bush House, just next to India House. It is a moving plaque that reminds...

Do not become so obsessed with ideology as to refuse to look at data. Admittedly, this tends to happen on the left, particularly with regards to a certain noxious political system that lasted longer than Fascism and Nazism and killed far more people as well as destroying societies on a grander scale.Tory Historian has started reading "In Denial" by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, which is subtitled "Historians, Communism and Espionage". It is a tale of refusal by American historians (and how one wishes for a similar work...

Tory Historian is very pleased that one can celebrate on the same day the Patron Saint of England and her greatest playwright, though just as St George is the Patron Saint of many other places and entities so Shakespeare is a playwright for the whole world.St George, a military saint, though paintings that depict him tend to show him as a very youthful, sometimes even effeminate soldier, is highly venerated in all the Orthodox Churches...

As it is Budget Day, I thought it would be fun to have pictures of successful Conservative Chancellors of yore. Remember when the day was not greeted with absolute terror?So here we have Nigel Lawson presenting his 1986 budget, Geoffrey Howe working (well, no longer working, one hopes as it is the actual day) on 1981 budget and Norman Lamont about to announce in 1993 that the recession is ebbing and the figures show a slow growth. No, the...

... since we have had a quotation from Edmund Burke on this blog and the time has come to remedy that. This is a little less well known than some others and comes from Observations on 'The Present State of the Nation', published in 1769 as a response to the Whig politician, George Grenville. It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.How useful it would be for us all to remember th...

Let us turn away from those painful events in the Colonies as mentioned in the previous posting and look at the birthday of a great man, an economist and somebody who, to Tory Historian's amazement, became a Unitarian after he broke with his Sephardic Jewish family that had come over from Portugal via Holland.Yes, the man is David Ricardo, one of the most influentical political economists, the man who put together the theory of comparative...

Tory Historian is ambivalent about the War of American Independence. In many ways, given the ideas that were swirling around in the 13 colonies at the time and given that those involved on all sides (including the many loyalists among the colonists) were, strictly speaking, still British, it is reasonable to call the conflict the third civil war that formulated the basic political ideology of the Anglosphere.On the other hand, there is...

Tory Historian, half-way through Baroness James's last novel "The Private Patient" is once again perplexed why it is impossible to like the lady's late novels. After all, she is a conservative writer (as well as a Conservative peer) and one who is a practitioner of the traditional form of detective story. She has, indeed, been in trouble for expressing views that detective stories can be written only about people who understand the difference between right and wrong. She was accused of snobbery (presumably with violence, to...

For reasons that will never be explained 2009 is a year of many anniversaries for important composers. One of the greatest, George Frideric Handel, is remembered today as April 14 marks the 250th anniversary of his death.Somehow it seems appropriate that this celebration or remembrance should happen on the day after Easter Monday for one of Handel’s greatest works is, indisputably, his oratorio, Messiah, which produces new joys on each...

Well, some things do change. For instance, the book in Tory Historian’s hands, the 1969 edition of Dorothy L. Sayers’s highly intricate and literate plays about the life of Christ, “The Man Born To Be King” tells one that these plays were written for and performed on Children’s Hour on BBC Radio during the war.Children’s Hour? We have nothing called that these days but we do have children’s programmes on TV if not on radio and they are...

Reading Jonah Goldberg’s “Liberal Fascism” – a fascinating book but sometimes repetitive – Tory Historian came across the following rather pithy summary of what classical fascism and present-day left-wing or, as Americans call it, liberal thinking is: As we’ve seen, ideologically fascist and progressive totalitarianism was never a mere doctrine of statism. Rather, it claimed that the state was the natural brain of the organic body politic....