Food in wartime Britain, she had to admit, was hardly inspiring.

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean...

By the end of the 1970s Britain was in a mess.

In the words of Mr Thierry Coup of Warner Bros: ‘We are taking the most iconic and powerful moments of the stories and putting them in an immersive environment. It is taking the theme park...

You know, I’ve just about got used to the fact that people in Britain know who I am on some level, but the notion that there’s any kind of international recognition is still slightly bizarre...

This is no war of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition; it is a war of peoples and of causes. There are vast numbers, not only in this Island but in every...

She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.

Like most cities, London could be a lonely place…

It was so difficult to dress appropriately when the seasons changed – the British weather was the nothing if not erratic. Spring was the worst – freezing in Brighton this morning and then practically tropical...

This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health...

I said I didn’t think it would be a collectivist state so much as a wilderness in which most people lived hand to mouth, and the rich would live like princes – better than the...

You know, sometimes I don’t understand what’s wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don’t seem to have the gumption to exploit our...

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the ‘soul’ of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the...

London is one of the world’s centres of Arab journalism and political activism. The failure of left and right, the establishment and its opposition, to mount principled arguments against clerical reaction has had global ramifications....

Britain wouldn’t have won the war without its eccentric geniuses.

British diplomats and Anglo-American types in Washington have a near-superstitious prohibition on uttering the words ‘Special Relationship’ to describe relations between Britain and America, lest the specialness itself vanish like a phantom at cock-crow.

The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On...

The discovery that detonated Cleveland is one of Britain’s great contributions to awareness of child abuse. In 1986 and 1987 the Leeds paediatricians Dr Jane Wynne and Dr Christopher Hobbs reported in the Lancet that...

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the...

This is an odd one. You have one country in the world where a word has a deeper meaning, it can really mess with design plans. …But we have a difficult situation here so I...

It is truth, in the old saying, that is ‘the daughter of time,’ and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one...

The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits;- on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

America: It’s like Britain, only with buttons.

Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry; here in the USA it seemed to be true that if you dared to give things...

The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken...

The rich feel much less need than their predecessors to account for their wealth, whether to society, to governments or to God. Their attitudes and values are not seriously challenged by anyone. The respect now...

Upstairs on a bus! It’s Unbelievable

Yeah. Floyd is his batman.”His what?”Batman, like in the British army, each officer had a batman, a personal servant.”You spend too much time reading, Spenser. You know more stuff that don’t make you money than...

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just ‘the occupation’ but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant...

Frank Olson had joined the Special Operations Division of the Army’s Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick at its inception in 1950. He was issued a Q clearance, the civilian equivalent of the military’s top secret...

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

In the spring of 1990 I flew to Aspen, Colorado, to cover a summit meeting between Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and President George Herbert Walker Bush. This fairly routine political event took on sudden significance...

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.