Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

In these days when politicians are despised, and the old aristocracy regarded either as a joke or a standing offence, it is hard to conceive that a century ago such people were the equivalent of pop ...

In this detailed and tautly written account, Guy Walters daringly takes a wrecker’s ball to that treasured national icon, the Great Escape. It is a heroic historical endeavour because the myth of the ...

Despite everything, I am six weeks married. The ‘everything’ is not the man. It’s marriage – an institution that I long hesitated to enter. For one thing, I didn’t understand what the state, the ...

Mo Mowlam will go down in history for two things. She was Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when the Good Friday Agreement, that benighted province’s best chance for peace, was signed, and ...

At Runnymede on 15 June 1215, King John sealed an agreement ‘for the reform of our realm’. At the head of the list of witnessing barons appeared the name of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke (c ...

In 1881, shortly before his death, Trelawny was visited by the eminent archivist Sir Sidney Colvin. Like others who had beaten a path to Trelawny’s door, Colvin had come to listen to a legendary ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

When I was military attaché in Rome, an Alpini general once asked me who were the ten greatest British generals. I replied that there would not be much argument about the top five but that opinion ...

The story of Saladin has been told many times. One of the most influential portraits of the 12th-century Ayyubid sultan appeared in a work of fiction, Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman (1825). In that ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...