Conservative History Journal

Having just read one of E. C. R. Lorac's novels, These Names Make Clues, (not one of her best, as it happens though it strengthens my suspicion that Edith Caroline Rivett, a. k. a. E. C. R. Lorac, a. k. a. Carol Carnac, was a crossword addict who would not have dreamed of starting her day's activity without finishing the one in the Times first) I have once again noted a curious aspect to Golden Age Detective (GAD) novels. The characters, if they happen to be educated literate ones, which they often are, always seem to have...

Tory Historian was engaged in a discussion about the author of what might have been the earliest collection of railway detective stories by V. L. Whitrechurch and decided to find the book, having read several though not all of those adventures. As ever, London Library came up trumps and there, on the right shelf, was the 1977 reprint with a highly informative introduction by Bryan Morgan of Stories of the Railway, which is, as it...

Tory Historian has managed to replace Peter Hopkirk's excellent The Great Game, a copy of which has gone AWOL. There it was, at one of the few remaining second-hand bookshops in Charing Cross Road, Henry Pordes Books. Even better, this was a new edition, published by John Murray (sadly now a part of Hodder and Stoughton) in 2006, sixteen years after the original, during which time many things happened in Central Asia and a...

Unlike Edmund Burke, Sir Robert Peel was most definitely a Conservative, one of the most important leaders of the party. Today is the anniversary of his death. He was thrown from his horse on June 29, 1850 and died after a good deal of suffering on July 2. Though he had lost a great deal of popularity towards the end of his premiership, such is the fickle nature of the crowd that his funeral became the centre of huge national mourning. The...