European Health Ministers A kind correspondent sent me the following details about Health Ministers in France, Portugal, Italy and Spain, in that order. It makes interesting reading, if…
Famous Spy Masters through the ages
In the first of this three-part series about British and international secret services and their chiefs, three British spy-masters were described fairly extensively – those three who controlled…
The end of the Church of England?
All ends have to have a beginning, and the beginning of the end for the Church of England started at the beginning of the 20th century. The outrage…
British Intelligence Services
In a recent edition I talked about MI6, which was once called SIS, and which, oddly enough, is mostly referred to these days using that original acronym (the…
Cardinal Richelieu: a much maligned duke
In half a dozen films, especially Hollywood films, the figure of the Duke of Richelieu has been categorized by famous actors as a plotting, conspiring, malignant courtier and…
David Cameron: How is he doing?
Not very long ago the British people decided they had had enough of Blairism, not enhanced much by Brownism when Tony Blair stood down as prime minister. Typically,…
Happy birthday MI6
I am reminded by the publication of an enormous new book (810 pages) written by Keith Jeffery that Great Britain’s first official secret service agency has just passed…
History of the Czech Republic
What happened to Czechoslovakia? The middle-European country formerly known as Czechoslovakia was created from the northern part of the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire, at the end of the First…
The Schlieffen Plan
General Count von Schlieffen (1833 – 1913) was Chief of the German General Staff from 1891 until he retired in 1905. As a testament to his work for…
The White Rajah of Sarawak
In a recent article, I published a brief account of the rise and fall of the British empire. The empire was just as much a product of private…