Simon Jenkins’s Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Parts will come out in a new edition next month. He writes for the Guardian and the Sunday Times.
At five o’clock in the morning on 21 September 1809, two men set out from London in two carriages and headed for Putney Heath. They brought two seconds, two sets of pistols, two hatreds and a total misunderstanding about what had recently passed between them. They then fought a duel. One was unscathed and the other received a flesh wound to his thigh, narrowly avoiding an artery. One...
Men are dying daily to bring Western democracy to supposedly less advanced parts of the world. Its export is the chief cause of conflict between the developed and the developing world, in Asia, Africa and Latin America. But how healthy is that democracy? Most people assume that its requirements are met by a periodic visit to a polling booth, but dictators can arrange that. What if ever fewer...
Of the monuments of the Thatcher era, one of the most intriguing is a small file card, on which are written four pairs of words: Discord-Harmony, Error-Truth, Doubt-Faith, Dispair [sic]-Hope....
Seven miles high above the Bay of Biscay and bound for Madrid, reading the daily papers is the alternative to a British Airways breakfast at noon. What is news? A kiss, it seems. England has won...
In the opening paragraph of their important book on the Falklands War, Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins write: ‘So extraordinary an event was it that, even after men began to die, many of...
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