When listening to the Declaration of Independence tomorrow, it’s well to recall how much of today’s American politics – and fiscal frolics – have English precedents. Our break with…
On October 6, 1925, President Calvin Coolidge delivered a speech in Omaha to the national convention of the American Legion. He defended four concepts his audience –…
How Dickensian was your boarding school? That this question, hotly debated between ages 13 and 18, persists in my peers’ seventh decade says much about their schools’ capacity…
‘John Masters is now an almost forgotten novelist… A figure of quiet authority, he receives, in James Salter’s memoir Burning the Days (1997), the finest compliment a man…
The resurgence of piracy marks the periodic declines of civilisation, or of empire when the two words aren’t synonyms. Even Moamar Khadafy[1], when he’d achieved the status…
The Spanish-American War Memorial in a carelessly tended small park in Newport, Rhode Island, bears these words: ‘Dedicated to the memory of the citizens of Newport who served…
US 23 runs flat and straight through large farms between Marion and Toledo, Ohio. When farmers fertilised fields with a winter’s hog manure, a young driver had 90 miles to…