Conservative History Journal

Tim Stanley's article in History Today says what we all think: a good funeral creates and propagates myths. He tries to lay to rest some of the myths that surround Margaret Thatcher on both sides but one cannot help feeling that it is a lost cause. At least, in her case, there are arguments, discussions and books that are more or less objective being written now. Not so with Churchill or not so for a good long time after his funeral. As Tim Stanley rightly says, Churchill's funeral produced no discussions, no debates,...

Tory Historian finds it extraordinary that those in the culture industry (and it has become an industry though not all of it creates anything) should have such a sneering attitude to the businessmen and women who have made the money that made much of our cultural heritage possible. According to many of them the proper person to subsidize their activities is the taxpayer whose opinion is never asked and who contributes the money involuntarily. The alternative, they so often pronounce, money contributed voluntarily by the person...

History Today blog informs us that the two winners of the 2012 Wolfson History Prize are Christopher Duggan for Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy and Susan Brigden for Thomas Wyatt: The Heart’s Forest. Both sound very interesting and are hereby added to the notional pile of books to be re...

Self-explanatory, I thi...

The Folio Society Gallery in the British Library is an odd bit of space between the main staircase and the coffee bar. At present and for another week it is occupied by a slightly eccentric but delightful exhibition, called Murder in the Library: An A- Z of Crime Fiction. Tory Historian visited it a couple of times and took copious notes. The biggest criticism is that too many of the exhibits are modern and unexciting paperbacks...

A real-life paper copy of the West Midlands History Magazine that analyzes Enlightenment, its people and organizations in that part of the country. The article on Industrial Enlightenment is fascinating. More goodies to read. Also a gem of a book: The Odd Thing About the Colonel, a collection of articles and essays by one of the greatest of conservative journalists of the twentieth century, Colin Welch, sent to me, very kindly by his daughter, Frances Welch, herself a formidable histori...

Last year Tory Historian wrote an angry and scathing posting about the mess that Tate Britain (the Tate to many of us, harrumph) had become. Well, there was some good news in the Evening Standard today. According to the Director, Penelope Curtis, A complete rehang of the collection at Millbank will give visitors a chronological history of British art, says director Penelope Curtis — and throw up some exciting juxtapositions. One worries a little (well, TH does) about those "exciting juxtapositions" but displaying the British...