Robert Kee

Robert Kee is at present working on a BBC Tevevision series about Irish history, and is the author of a book on the subject, The Green Flag.

Fighting off the Boche

Robert Kee, 11 October 1990

The past, we’ve been told, is a different country and they do things differently there, but not for me, not where Alan Taylor is concerned. He had a most wonderfully consistent personality. That look of amused, quizzical discernment which is even in the photographs his third wife Eva took of him in the sunshine on the last day of his life was much the same as that which confronted me when I read out my first half-baked essays to him at Holywell Ford after he had first come to Magdalen in 1938.

Milne’s Cropper

Robert Kee, 7 July 1988

Two interesting questions are raised by Alasdair Milne’s book about his time at the BBC. The first, more important but less interesting, is: what, if anything, is wrong with the BBC? The second is: what, if anything, is wrong with Alasdair Milne?

Yugoslavia’s Past

Robert Kee, 5 June 1980

The story runs that the reason Tito lived so long in his last illness was that no one in the Presidential Council dared be the first to suggest that the various life-supporting machines should be switched off. Maybe in the end someone dared. Or maybe Tito, whose body in life had done so much to reconcile the politically irreconcilable in Yugoslavia, performed its final patriotic service in death.

Westminster’s Irishman

Paul Smith, 7 April 1994

Sometimes he was Smith, sometimes he was Stewart, and sometimes he was Preston, but the most telling of the aliases Charles Stewart Parnell used to conduct the liaison with Mrs O’shea that...

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Little Dog

Alan Milward, 5 January 1989

Last year was the year of commemorative news. The media discovered that the public was old enough to be as interested in events from fifty years ago as it is in today’s news. Of these...

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What did they do in the war?

Angus Calder, 20 June 1985

When, in War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the...

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Sexual Tories

Angus Calder, 17 May 1984

Twenty-odd years ago I was lucky enough to hear the great Jeannie Robertson, then at the height of her powers as a singer in Scots of anything from ‘classic’ ballads to sheer bawdy....

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Getting back

Adrian Poole, 1 July 1982

In what is by far the most rewarding item in Calder’s New Writing and Writers 19, the main character of Harry Mulisch’s ‘Antique Air’ thinks of the war as ‘an almost...

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Keith Middlemas on the history of Ireland

Keith Middlemas, 22 January 1981

An Englishman addressing himself to Irish history and contemporary politics ought always to bear in mind John Stuart Mill’s provocative remark, that it was not Ireland but England that was...

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