Nigel Jones is a historian and journalist
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The BBC is in the headlines again – for all the wrong reasons. A TV drama on the fall of Huw Edwards, the corporation’s disgraced former chief news presenter, is due to start tonight. Rather than keep shtum, Edwards has lashed out at Channel 5 for failing to ‘check with me the truth’, thus ensuring even
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Eighty years ago today, Winston Churchill coined the phrase ‘Special Relationship’ to describe the bond between the United States and Great Britain. That label for the close trans-Atlantic friendship, based on a common history, language and culture, and shared political and economic interests, has been repeatedly invoked ever since. Although it has frequently come under
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When Wuthering Heights (first published in 1847) is splashed across the front page of the Daily Mail as a free offer to readers and sells more than ten thousand copies in a month, you know that this says something significant about our current cultural tastes. Just as Mr Darcy’s soaking shirt was a pivotal moment for millennial women in the 1990s thanks to the television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and
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Eighty years ago this month, in February 1946, the left-wing Tribune magazine published George Orwell’s essay ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ in which the writer identified a certain class of crime as most appealing to the tabloid-reading British public – and contrasted the ‘cosiness’ of this type of early 20th-century domestic murder with the brutal sadism of killings committed in Britain
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When did you last visit the National Portrait Gallery? If, like me, you haven’t darkened its doors since it reopened following a £43 million makeover and expansion in 2023, stand by for a shock. Instead of being just a selection of the famous faces featuring in our island story – the politicians, poets, scientists and
I have been having a John le Carré holiday. Five years after the great master of the spy thriller went to his final safe house in the sky, I spent chunks of the festive season watching two of his series on TV, and reading a slim volume called The Secret Life of John le Carré
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Donald Trump likes to keep both his friends and enemies guessing. It’s no surprise then that his plans for Venezuela’s future after his typically bold and reckless abduction of dictator Nicolas Maduro are a mystery. Trump has awarded the plum of power in Caracas not to Machado but to Maduro’s vice-president and oil minister Delcy Rodriguez
Donald Trump’s undeclared war in Venezuela against the Marxist regime of President Nicolas Maduro has erupted into the open. Trump says the US has captured Venezuela’s leader and his wife. In a statement on Truth Social, Trump wrote: The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President
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It is not only our hapless Prime Minister who supported the release of Alaa Abd el-Fattah from an Egyptian prison, with the PM on Friday saying he was ‘delighted’ to be able to welcome him to Britain. Our luvvie community have also long campaigned for el-Fattah’s freedom. A lengthy list of actors – including Stephen Fry,
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It is a cherished myth among Oliver Cromwell’s many critics that our only home-grown military dictator ‘cancelled Christmas’. It gives the Ollie haters yet another reason to loathe the warty-faced old brute, alongside his notorious Irish massacres (of which more later) – but is it true? In fact, there is no evidence that Cromwell initiated
The victory of Jose Antonio Kast confirms Latin America’s shift to the right
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In Terence Rattigan’s 1948 play The Browning Version (filmed in 1951 starring Michael Redgrave), a public-school classics teacher called Arthur Crocker-Harris is appalled to discover that he is known to his pupils as ‘the Himmler of the Fifth’. According to the Guardian and the BBC, the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage was a fan of
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Winston Churchill and his arch enemy Adolf Hitler didn’t have a lot in common, but one passion they did share was painting: both the heroic wartime prime minister and the genocidal Nazi dictator were keen amateur artists. While auction houses are reluctant to handle or sell Hitler’s landscapes for obvious reasons, Churchill’s pictures have vastly
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At the dawn of my stellar journalistic career I served for two years as Crown Court correspondent of the Cambridge Evening News, and every working day would dutifully cycle to the city’s Guildhall to witness juries deciding the fate of the unfortunates who appeared before them. With that experience, I have more than an amateur
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It is a well known axiom of politics that once you compare your opponents to Hitler’s Nazis you have well and truly lost the argument. But that golden rule seems to have been lost on Tory party chairman Kevin Hollinrake who has rightly come under heavy fire for comparing Reform UK to the Nazis. Hollinrake’s
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Everyone knows the rhyme about Adolf Hitler. The popular ribald wartime song, beloved of school children, has it that: ‘Hitler has only got one ball/ The other is in the Albert Hall/ Himmler is very similar/ And poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!’. The rhyme works, but is it right? A two-part Channel
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Asked if he actually believed in ghosts, M.R. James, author of the greatest ghost stories in the English language, answered equivocally that he was prepared to consider anything for which there was sufficient evidence. It’s the time of year when Monty James used to invite students to his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, and turn
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James Watson has died at the great age of 97. Obituaries of the American scientist, who, with his late British collaborator Francis Crick, first proposed the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, after paying due tribute to his earth-shattering discovery, inevitably included the information that his later years were clouded by his ‘controversial’ views
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One of the first articles I wrote for The Spectator back in 2011 described the explosive celebration of Bonfire Night in Lewes, the ancient county town of East Sussex where I then lived. Today, such is the relentless march of purse-lipped Wokedom, it is necessary – in writing about this eccentric folk festival – to
It was an ethnic massacre so bad that it could be seen from space. Satellites picked up bloodied patches of soil in North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, after Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) swept into the besieged city. Pools of blood and piles of bodies were identified. Thousands of people are feared to have died in
