Conservative History Journal

Most readers of this blog would have heard by now of the death of Cecil Parkinson, one of the big beasts of Thatcherite politics in the eighties. He was one of several ex-future-Prime Ministers; at times it seemed that anyone who was seen as a successor to Thatcher was cursed, in Parkinson's case by his inability to run his private affairs in some kind of a seemly fashion. In some ways his career is a modern morality play though, I...

William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister at the age of 24 and died, on January 23, 1806, at the age of 46, exhausted by work and, let us not mince our words, the amount of port he put away every day of his life. How much more might he have achieved if not for the interminable French wars. One of my favourite films is Carol Reed's The Young Mr Pitt, a very fine propaganda film made in 1942 with the great Robert Donat playing both...

Josephine Tey has, at various times, been described as the "fifth queen of detection" after Christie, Marsh, Allingham and Sayers; in fact, she has been described as being in various ways better than most of the four. Jennifer Morag Henderson repeatedly makes the claim for her that she somehow bridges the space between Christie's emphasis on plotting and Chandler's interest in characters and environment. It is hard to agree with that...