The Spectator

Sunday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Stuck in Holland

From our UK edition

In 1914 some 1,500 men from ‘Churchill's Little Army’, the First Royal Naval Brigade, retreated from the defence of Antwerp to the Netherlands. As a neutral country the Netherlands was obliged to intern any soliders from warring armies that crossed its borders to stop them re-joining the fight. The men were put in the ‘English Camp’ (or ‘HMS Timbertown’) in Groningen, where they were based until the war ended. From ‘With the interned sailors in Holland’, The Spectator, 24 April 1915: Sir—Réveille sounding at 6.30 every morning rouses us from our bunks, ready to face another day in Holland. We have little to do before breakfast at 7.

Saturday

The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Gallipoli

From our UK edition

Today is the 100th anniversary of the first landings of the Gallipoli campaign by Anzac troops. The battle to take control of the Dardanelles and Bosphorous to open a supply route to Russia and force the Ottoman Empire out of the war would, in its eight months, leave 130,000 dead. The Spectator was to report the first news of the landings in its 1 May 1915 issue. Here, from 'News of the Week' in the 24 April 1915 issue, The Spectator speculates about the course of action in the Dardanelles: The other important event of the week has been the landing of a British force at Enos, the most westerly point of Turkish territory in Europe, the point just beyond which the new Bulgarian frontier begins.

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 23 April 2015

From our UK edition

Enemies within Sir: I thought Matthew Parris was typically incisive in his last column, but perhaps not quite as much as the person who wrote its online headline, ‘Scotland knows the power of a common enemy. We English don’t’ (18 April). It is true that ‘the wish to be the underdog’ is a defining urge of our age, even in relatively prosperous polities such as Scotland and Catalonia. But Parris is wrong when he claims that the closest the English come to the ‘Braveheart feeling’ is in their collective memory of the second world war. If only that were true. Would any other country make so little of its crucial role in the defeat of the most evil ideology the world has known?

The Spectator

Barometer | 23 April 2015

From our UK edition

Any answers? Nigel Farage accused the audience in the BBC opposition leaders’ debate of being left-wing. Need insulting an audience destroy a political career? — Former US Vice President Dan Quayle did it on a number of occasions, telling an audience of American Samoans in 1989: ‘You all look like happy campers to me.’ Two years later he upset the American Bar Association by asking: ‘Does America really need 70% of the world’s lawyers?’ — Current US Vice President Joe Biden told a crowd in Wisconsin in 2010: ‘You’re the dullest audience I’ve ever spoken to.’ — Nigel Farage has done it before.

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 23 April 2015

From our UK edition

Home The prospect of a parliamentary alliance between Labour and the Scottish National Party injected an element of fear into the election campaign. The SNP manifesto promised to increase spending and to find a way to stop the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent. Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, said she wanted to make Labour in government ‘bolder and better’. Lord Forsyth, a former Conservative Scottish secretary, said that the building up of the SNP, to take seats in Scotland, was a ‘dangerous view which threatens the integrity of our country’. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said the Tories should not be ‘talking up’ the SNP. Even the Democratic Unionists began to eye prospects for advantage in a hung parliament.