Conservative History Journal

This really is just a posting about random thoughts and a short one at that. (Phew! I hear you say.) I went to an interesting talk about the Human Rights Act and whether it is a good thing or not by Guy Herbert, the man who runs NO2ID. His conclusions were not quite what people might expect, unless you knew Guy and his habit of thinking every issue through to the logical and unpalatable end. During the discussion, almost inevitably, the subject of Magna Carta came up with somebody arguing that a great deal of the...

The British Library is, as everyone knows or should know, one of the finest institutions in the world with a wonderful collection of books and helpful staff in the reading rooms, fascinating exhibitions, a superlatice collection of stamps for those who find the subject interesting (alas, TH seems to have got over that particular obsession some years ago) and a publishing arm of some distinction. In particular, Tory Historian has been overjoyed...

The Conservative History Group will be holding a meeting on November 24 in the House of Lords in Committee Room 1: Professor Steven Fielding and Michael Dobbs will speak on Politics in Fiction - from Disraeli to Dobbs. You may think that one of the speakers will not be able to avoid a few references to himself but I couldn't possibly comment. Here is the information as sent out by the Group: Steven Fielding is Professor of Political History at the University of Nottingham. His new book, A State of Play, explores the depiction...

That anniversary is coming and many preparations are being made, some attractive, some less so. One cannot help suspecting that a great deal of nonsense will be written and spoken (indeed, already are written and spoken) on the subject as well as a great deal of sense. The British Library is bringing together all four existing versions of that great document but, it seems, only for one day. There is a ballot for 1,215 people "to be part...

Captain Frederick Burnaby has appeared on this blog before (here, for example) and deserves a great deal of attention. It so happens that I have recently finished his second book of adventures to do with Russia, whom he did not trust in the slightest, On Horseback Through Asia Minor, written and published in 1877. Burnaby was definitely in the Turcophile camp, politically speaking, though he found some of the Turkish attitudes frustrating....

This September's issue of the Conservative History Journal (the printed edition) published by the Conservative History Group concentrates, understandably, on the two great anniversaries: 100 years since the beginning of the world-shaking war of 1914 - 1918 and 300 years since the Hanoverians assumed the throne of this country with their descendants still there. They have not yet overtaken the Plantagenets in their longevity as a ruling dynasty but they are well on the road to it. Lord Lexden, official historian of the...

The more Tory Historian reads works by and about Dorothy L. Sayers (who has appeared on this blog a few times) the more it becomes apparent that Miss Sayers (who was, for certain purposes Mrs Fleming) would not have liked the appropriation of her carefully crafted characters by Jill Paton Walsh. She spent some time discussing the whole process of creation both in literary and theological terms in The Mind of the Maker, a book TH has read...