The U.S.S. Constitution, "Old Ironsides", one of the United States Navy's first frigates The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions and the Making of the Modern World Linda Colley, Profile, 512 pages, £25 KEN BELL finds a new way of looking at global constitutional history A history of constitution making does not sound…
Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain Fintan O’Toole, Head of Zeus, 2019 Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles Fintan O’Toole, Head of Zeus, 2020 KEN BELL says a prominent Remainer still doesn’t comprehend Brexit I have just finished reading Heroic Failure and Three Years In Hell, both by Fintan O’Toole, which is…
SHUTTERSTOCK This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe Robert Tombs, Allen Lane, 224 pages, £11.22 KEN BELL praises an exceptionally historically-informed Brexit explainer The small numbers who read the Guardian will no doubt disagree, but the argument over Brexit is now as much a part of history as the Free Trade debate that…
KEN BELL enjoys an amusing and observant, if ultimately insubstantial, account of an eventful political period The Diary of an MP’s Wife, Sasha Swire, Little, Brown, 544 pages, £8 A diarist needs a good eye for the little details that makes the reader feel that he is in the room where the events are happening.…
KEN BELL reads a useful analysis of what led to the 2016 vote Brexitland, Maria Sobelewska and Robert Ford, Cambridge University Press, 2020, 408 pages, £11.99 Porfirio Díaz, the man who dominated Mexican politics for a generation until his downfall in 1910, once remarked that nothing ever happened in his country until it happened. What…
Lord Boothby, Reggie Kray and friend The Peer And The Gangster Daniel Smith, The History Press, 2020, hb, 256 pages, £14.99 KEN BELL traces an old and sordid story uniting West End and East The Sunday Mirror thought that it had the scoop of the century in July 1964, when it ran a front-page splash…