It was hardly their own shining abilities alone that allowed a son, two grandsons, and a son-in-law of Winston Churchill to make their way into parliament.
High-level political wives are by no means new. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when patricians dominated British political life, it was common for politicians’ spouses to play an active political role.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, products and tastes developed in America have increasingly influenced lifestyles in Europe, whereas in previous centuries, it was generally the other way around.
The 1857 uprising in India did not free the subcontinent, but it changed the way the British viewed and sought to govern it.
Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.
Look at how the British covered India with railroads, and it is easy to view them as modernisers. Look, however, at the abysmal levels of mass illiteracy in the subcontinent they left behind in 1947, and they appear rather differently.
Brussels and its multifarious networks provide member states not just with trading access but also a guarantee of regular encounters, negotiations, contacts, informants, and alliances.
One of the benefits of working outside the U.K. is that I don’t have to keep fielding media/politicians’ enquiries about ‘Britishness’ and its ills.
I was in Boston, Massachusetts, when Princess Diana died.
Responding to Britain’s future challenges will require unceasing agility in seeking out new alliances and refurbishing old ones inside Europe, not just outside it.
London is not just an international financial centre: it is also one of the most ethnically diverse places on earth. Three hundred languages are represented within its boundaries, and – as is true of some other English cities – more than half of London’s inhabitants describe themselves as non-white.
It is hard to convince people that you mean them well if you are looking at them down the barrel of a gun.
One knows something is important when the powers that be choose not to acknowledge it in public.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, most people in Britain lived in small village communities. They knew all their neighbours. They dressed alike, and almost all were white. The vast majority belonged to the same religion and spoke much the same language.
Any kind of new U.K. federal system would almost certainly demand the creation of a written constitution. Properly drafted, such a document could, among many things, pin down more effectively the proper dimensions of prime ministerial power.
The so-called Boer War advertised British vulnerabilities, and these were confirmed by the Irish rising of 1916 and the subsequent creation of the Irish Free State, blows that attracted the notice and attention of colonial dissidents in Asia and Africa.
Before they became Americans, most white inhabitants of the 13 colonies considered themselves British. It was predictable, therefore, that they would lust after empire, because this was exactly what their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic also did.
Instead of exporting what they perceived to be rational, modern, humane government to their colonies, the British often found themselves propping up deeply unattractive and corrupt princelings and client rulers because this was the cheapest way of maintaining control.
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