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...

It is always difficult to work out who can be described as conservative if they are not Conservative and part of the British political scene. Harold Williams, a New Zealander who came to Britain and became a highly regarded journalist, reporting from Russia and becoming eventually Foreign Editor of The Times (when it was still the Thunderer and not a gossip rag) probably saw himself as a "liberal" and, indeed, in Russian terms that is...

It seems about time to start that campaign to have the whole of Channon's diaries becoming available and, indeed, published, as I wrote some time ago. The published diaries are fascinating and often remarkably accurate, despite a comment made by one reader on my posting. Chips may have been shallow (what politician is not?) but his judgements were remarkably accurate and his knowledge of what was going on phenomenal, With all the diaries...

There is no question: this blog has been shamefully neglected and one of my resolutions for the start of the new academic year, which, out of old habit, I consider to be more important than the start of the calendar one, is to post on it articles long and short several times a week. Indeed, I fully intend to post articles by other people who consider it worth their while to send me any. Everyone will be fully acknowledged and necessary links put in. Let me start with a link to an article in an American conservative publication,...

For another project I have been re-reading Edmund Crispin's detective stories and reading a biography of Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin by David Whittle, an enormously charming and talented as well as, in some ways, tragic figure. For those who might not know about him, let me explain that his real name was Bruce Montgomery and he used that to write music, both of the concrt and film variety. Among other scores, he was responsible for...

Without comment: ...

At dawn of June 22, 1941, Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Soviet Union. No, not the invasion of Russia. They moved fast, largely because the Soviet armed forces were unprepared, what with the huge purges in 1938, the continuing movement of prisoners east-wards from the Baltic states and eastern Poland and the inexplicable trust Stalin put in Hitler, but they did not reach what we might call Russia for several weeks....

A couple of weeks ago I was reminded that I did not blog last year about the most important anniversary of all, in a year full of important anniversaries, and that is the publication of John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps in the autumn of 1915. It was written by a convalescing Buchan, already a well known writer, in a couple of weeks, was serialized in Blackwood's Magazine in August and September and published as a book in October. As...

I have just finished reading Joshua Rubenstein's The Last Days of Stalin, a book I can thoroughly recommend to all who are interested in post-war European history. By and large the theme is not one for this blog but, as one would expect, Sir Winston Churchill appears in it and plays a slight equivocal role. Chapter 6 is entitled A Chance for Peace? and deals with the opportunity the West, led by President Eisenhower, might have taken...

When the news came in March 2010 that one of the best loved, most admired but also most feared members of the House of Lords, Baroness Park of Monmouth, had died, there was a general mourning and not just in the House but also among the many people who had known, worked with or just sat and talked to Daphne Park over many years. These were people who had known her in the Service, naturally, and in the various sister Services (I recall...

One of the funniest episodes of the peculiar time in which Ed Miliband was leader of the Labour Party was when he stated on a visit to Israel that he could be Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister. There was a world-wide response (in which a number of my non-British friends participated), which consisted largely of the question: what about Disraeli? What, indeed? A number of Mr Miliband's supporters tried to pooh-pooh Disraeli's claims...

This is something new on this blog. Tuesday Night Blogs have been going for several months and a number of bloggers interested in golden age detective writers (surely everyone will recognize the reference to the Tuesday Night Club) have been writing about ones decided on for the month. The first one was, of course, Agatha Christie and Curt Evans collected them all on his blog, The Passing Tramp. I took part in that but on Your Freedom...