A much shorter version of the following will appear in a future issue of the bimonthly magazine, the Idler: These days Breton folk music rarely travels east of Rennes or south of Nantes, let alone north of Roscoff. Radio 2’s flagship folk programme devotes airtime to francophone artists from Louisiana and Quebec, and yet it …
Category Archive: Uncategorized
Jul 09
Putting the French election result in (a historical) perspective
With Labour securing only 34% of the popular vote despite the party’s huge parliamentary majority, and Reform securing 14.3%, the tide of populism this side of la manche still seems high – with the potential to rise a lot higher. Nevertheless, we can now place the UK alongside Portugal, and to a degree Spain, in …
Jun 09
Eightieth anniversary of Keith Douglas’s death in Normandy
Today is the eightieth anniversary of the death of the poet and memoirist. What follows is the piece I wrote ten years for the New Statesman to mark the seventieth anniversary: Keith Douglas was just 24 when killed only three days after landing in Normandy. As 8th Armoured Brigade sought a breakout south of Bayeux, …
Jun 05
D-Day New Forest talk: Sway and the Sherwood Rangers, spring 1944
SWAY AND THE SHERWOOD RANGERS, SPRING 1944 This was the basis for a talk I gave in Sway village hall on 4 June 2024 as part of the village’s impressive array of D-Day anniversary events, partly organised in conjunction with St Barbe Museum & Art Gallery in Lymington. My thanks to fellow St Barbe trustee …
May 27
Tom Wolfe comes to Canterbury
With a Michael Lewis documentary last year, and a Network serialisation of his last novel, Tom Wolfe is back in the news. I wrote this for the Times Literary Supplement, but they said it was too long – fair enough. Radio silence from the LRB and the Atlantic. The piece will appear, for obvious reasons, …
Feb 04
100 years of Labour governments and the military: MacDonald to Starmer
Last Saturday – 27 January – I gave a paper in Cambridge at the conference organised by the Labour History Research Unit at Anglia Ruskin University’s Labour History Research Unit: How Labour Governs: A Conference to mark 100 years of Labour Governments. The following summarises my remarks on Labour governments and the defence establishment from …
Jan 09
Ramsay MacDonald: first Labour PM, but also airman and man of action!
The ever sharp MP and political thinker Jon Cruddas was on yesterday’s Radio 4’s ‘Start the Week’ talking about his new book: A Century of Labour marks the centenary of the first Labour Government. Ramsay MacDonald formed his first – minority – administration on 22 January 2024, combining the premiership with the position of Foreign …
Nov 02
Historians in high places can’t be intimidated by hard science
Ironically, it was a passing remark by Helen MacNamara in her evidence to the Covid inquiry that left me shaking my head in disbelief (sadly her observations re the toxic misogynistic culture that prevailed in Downing Street were all too predictable). The former deputy cabinet secretary believed that, having graduated in History, she and several …
Oct 27
Not going gently into that gentle good night: saluting an unsung hero
Last Monday I spent ten hours on the train – including Eurostar – travelling to a remote village on the border of Haute Marne and Burgundy in the vast Forêts National Park (vast as in seven Exmoors could fit into it – the distances between towns and villages are such that it feels like Texas …
Sep 23
Herbert Fisher, the International Brigader from a famous family forgotten for eight decades
This is an article in the current issue (no. 158) of The Historian, the magazine of the Historical Association. It was triggered by walking with my dog Django in the churchyard of St Nicholas in Brockenhurst on a mission to find Adeline Vaughan Williams’ grave in the Fisher family plot. I found the grave and an intriguing …
Adrian Smith, Emeritus Professor of Modern History, University of Southampton
