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1 week ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Simon Heffer
Everyone should study history, and here are 20 books I think everyone should read. They are expressly not the "best" history books ever written: no one can possibly have read the tens of thousands in English alone that would be required to begin forming such a judgment. But they are books that have greatly illuminated my understanding of history, and that in some cases took a remarkably original view of their subject.
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1 week ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Simon Heffer
As if the 1970s were not grim enough, with the hangover from the " Swinging Sixties ", the oil price boom and international recession, the decade also brought a wave of terrorism. Britain had the IRA, the Germans Baader-Meinhof, Latin America had the Uruguayan terrorist movement Tupamaros, and the United States the (by comparison) rather amateur Symbionese Liberation Army.
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2 weeks ago | 
spectator.com.au | Simon Heffer
Peter Watson begins his survey of the history of ideas in Britain with the assertion that the national mindset (which at that time was the English mindset) changed significantly after the accession of Elizabeth I.
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2 weeks ago | 
spectator.co.uk | Simon Heffer
Peter Watson begins his survey of the history of ideas in Britain with the assertion that the national mindset (which at that time was the English mindset) changed significantly after the accession of Elizabeth I.
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2 weeks ago | 
aol.co.uk | Simon Heffer
A preposterous inversion of the natural order of things caused me to meet Freddie Forsyth more than 30 years ago. He wrote me a fan letter. Had I been a fan-letter writing type, I ought by then to have sent him several – notably about The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, two of the best thrillers of the 20th century that I had relished as a teenager in the 1970s.
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2 weeks ago | 
yahoo.com | Simon Heffer
Model mum?: Lady Pamela Smith, standing, beside fashion designer Coco Chanel in 1932 - BettmannWriting biography is a perilous exercise. To do it properly, one must know one’s subject – either personally or through extensive research – and yet avoid hagiography or hostility. The matter can become more complicated if the subject is a member of the author’s family.
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3 weeks ago | 
yahoo.com | Simon Heffer
Sarah Vine and Michael Gove in 2016 - ShutterstockThe “misery memoir” was a genre one thought peculiar to the early years of this century. However, with this strange book, Sarah Vine, formerly Mrs Michael Gove, has resurrected it. Its title, How Not to Be a Political Wife, seems flippant, and one expects, when beginning it, to experience some sort of extended stunt. What one gets is in turns interesting, embarrassing and, fundamentally, mildly tragic.
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3 weeks ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Simon Heffer
The "misery memoir " was a genre one thought peculiar to the early years of this century. However, with this strange book, Sarah Vine, formerly Mrs Michael Gove, has resurrected it. Its title, How Not to Be a Political Wife, seems flippant, and one expects, when beginning it, to experience some sort of extended stunt. What one gets is in turns interesting, embarrassing and, fundamentally, mildly tragic.
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3 weeks ago | 
yahoo.com | Simon Heffer
The clearest memory of my first visit to Dublin, nearly 40 years ago, is my initial sight of Merrion Square. It is – whatever the claims of Bloomsbury, Bath, or the New Town in Edinburgh – the finest Georgian architectural spectacle in the British Isles. For those who do not know it, Merrion Square is a vast rectangle of terraced houses in the centre of the Irish capital, surrounding a superb park – originally a private space for residents, now open to the public.
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3 weeks ago | 
telegraph.co.uk | Simon Heffer
