Photo: Wikimedia Commons Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39 Florian Illies, Simon Pare (trans.), Profile Books, June 2023, 336 pages, £20 KEN BELL says Weimar-era Bohemians failed to respond to the Nazi threat On one level, Florian Illies’ Love in a Time of Hate: Art and…
Spare Prince Harry, Bantam, 2023, 416pps., £20 KEN BELL finds the Prince’s blockbuster book unexpectedly engaging There can be few people in the English-speaking world who have not read a review of Spare, the memoir written by Prince Harry, and it is a pity that so many of those reviews seem to have been written…
Beer-makers, Clapham Common, 1877. Wikimedia Commons Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London Charlie Taverner, Oxford University Press, 2023, 256pps, £30 KEN BELL remembers the street-traders who fed a burgeoning city The image of London street food is a trendy one, with well-paid hipsters eating what they sweetly tell each other is authentic, usually…
Photo: Ben Kirby. Courtesy of Pexels Whatever Happened To Tradition? History, Belonging and the Future of the West Tim Stanley, Bloomsbury Continuum, October 2021, 272 pages, £20 KEN BELL finds that banished traditions can come back in new ways The central theme of Tim Stanley’s Whatever Happened to Tradition is that tradition in the West…
Image: Clem Onojeghuo. Courtesy of Pexels About Britain: A Journey of Seventy Years and 1,345 Miles Tim Cole, Bloomsbury Continuum, June 2021, 384 pages, £18.99 KEN BELL drives down a northwestern Memory Lane The Festival of Britain in 1951 was intended to show that the war was over and Great Britain was back on her…
Corpse of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World Edward Shawcross, Faber & Faber, January 2022, 336 pages, £20 KEN BELL reflects on a Mexico that might have been Mexico has only ever had one ruler who cared about the Indians and he was shot by order…
Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 Max Hastings, William Collins, September 2022, 576 pages, £30 KEN BELL recalls the Cold War’s most dangerous moment 2022 has been the sixtieth anniversary year of the Cuban Missile Crisis so a lot has been written about the event, with Max Hastings’ Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 being…
Chips Channon. Photo: National Portrait Gallery, Creative Commons licence The Diaries 1943-1957 Henry ‘Chips’ Channon and Simon Heffer, Hutchinson, 896pp, £35 KEN BELL closes the book on the celebrated diarist This third volume of the Channon diaries concludes the publication of all the surviving diaries that have come down to us, and as with the…
Memorial to the "Disappeared" at the Naval Mechanics Institute, Buenos Aires. Source: Wikimedia Commons Kidnapped by the Junta: Inside Argentina’s Wars with Britain and Itself Julian Manyon, Icon Books, 336 pages, 2022, £20 KEN BELL is gripped by a ripping yarn of kidnap and high politics Julian Manyon’s book is not a history of the…
Photo: Gage Skidmore. Wikimedia Commons One Party After Another: The Disruptive Life of Nigel Farage Michael Crick, Simon & Schuster, 2022, 606 pages, £25 KEN BELL reflects on the career of Brexit’s cheeky chappie Many of the people involved in the Brexit debate will merit footnotes in the histories of the period that have yet…