This December marks thirty years since the death of Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister who took over in 1957 from Anthony Eden following the Suez Crisis. He is perhaps best known for his soundbites – describing the breakup of the …
Sir Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary (1905 to 16), helped take Britain into the First World War but the conflict weighed heavily on him. This blog looks at the physical and emotional strain on Grey during his final years in office
‘The sentence was such that it almost became a question of honour to challenge it . . . like a POW, I had a duty to escape.’[1] ‘Double Agent breaks out of jail’ On 11 November 2016, George Blake, the …
‘In order to be a good footballer, you must run swiftly and pass the ball accurately’. Wise words indeed – especially when one considers that they were uttered not by Jose Mourinho or Arsene Wenger, but by Kim Il Sung, …
The UK and the US shared common strategic interests in the region, but their analyses and policies were not identical and there were important differences in their tactical and diplomatic approaches’. (Chilcot Report on the Iraq enquiry, vol. I, p. …
The death of Lord Kitchener, who drowned when HMS Hampshire sank just off the Orkney’s north-west coast on 5 June 1916, came as a profound shock to the nation. The Secretary of State for War was the public face of …
It would not be in the public interest to disclose the circumstances in which Commander Crabb is presumed to have met his death. Mystery of the missing frogman Sixty years ago today, on 9 May 1956 the Prime Minister, Sir …
For almost 80 years the distinguished profile of Sir Edward Grey has looked on as the great and the good have made their way in and out of the ‘Ambassador’s Entrance’ of the Foreign Office. But how did this memorial …
In the early hours of Tuesday, 12 October 1915, Edith Cavell, a British nurse who had been working in Belgium, was executed by the Germans after being found guilty of helping over 200 Allied servicemen escape to England. At her …
The historian John Ehrman, who wrote an account of the atomic bomb and British policy based on privileged access to government records, wrote in 1953 that there were five questions that needed to be asked about the dropping of atomic …