Real Time History
Published 15 May 2026The 19th century is a time of violent global imperial competition. The Scramble for Africa and the Great Game between the Russian and British Empires over influence in Central Asia are among the best-known examples. But the 2nd half of the century also involved another Great Game – the Great Game for Asia.
00:00 Intro
05:35 1st Sino-Japanese War 1894-95
30:02 Boxer War 1900-01
55:40 Russo-Japanese War 1904-05
01:22:14 Conclusion
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October 12, 2026
The Great Game for Asia 1894-1905
October 11, 2026
Britain – “… one starts to wonder if a nation can run out of ruin”
In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank reflects on the sage words of Adam Smith during that eighteenth century unpleasantness with some of the North American colonies:
In 1777, Britain lost the battle of Saratoga — a decisive defeat that would spell the end of its rule over the 13 Colonies. A young John Sinclair declared that the nation would soon be ruined. An older and wiser Adam Smith replied that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”.
Smith would be vindicated. Despite losing 60 per cent of its North American territories, Great Britain would go on to become the leading economic and military power of the 19th century. But history does not necessarily repeat itself. Today, as the mistakes and catastrophes pile up one on another, one starts to wonder if a nation can run out of ruin.
Consider the news of the past week. The most dramatic scene played out late Sunday night in Gosport, as illegal immigrants were ferried onto shore by the coast guard. Overlooked by the remaining might of the Royal Navy, in sight of HMNB Portsmouth which two thirds of the surface fleet call home, illegal migrants were delivered to tax-payer funded accommodation by the British state. The full coercive power of that state was on display, but it was not directed towards the young men seeking to invade English waters, but against the people of Gosport. The entire town was locked down, and the right of assembly suspended, using a law usually deployed against vagrants and vandals. Legions of high-vis jacked police were deployed across the town, clashing with protestors in the streets of a once-sleepy seaside community.
This is bad enough, but consider what else is going on across the country. Prisoners were being released early, not because of their exemplary behaviour or reformed characters, but simply because we had run out of room to safely house them. The parole services openly admit they cannot cope, and parolees could wait weeks before they are fitted with electronic tags.
The economic situation is no happier. There is a global surge in bond yields, meaning higher costs of borrowing and straitened circumstances for our government as it prepares for the autumn budget later this month. War in the Gulf and the Arabian peninsula looks set to cause a surge in fuel prices over the coming winter, hitting consumers and business alike. Far from being prepared to weather this storm, Britain has some of the lowest diesel reserves in the developed world. Our domestic supplies of oil and gas, already squeezed by reckless environmental policies, could now face strike action that could see a third of production shut down.
If you have faith in British civil society and public life to respond with stoicism and solidarity, one can think again. The country recently had a hysterical and ugly debate over whether Rishi Sunak was a real Englishman, in which a number of right wing ethnic minority figures claimed not to be, and a number of progressives suggested that there is no ethnic English identity at all. In the latest horrific chapter of our coming apart as a culture, the Green Party passed a motion at its conference declaring that Zionism is “racist” and that Israel should be entirely annexed by a Palestinian state. During the same vote, they rejected a proposal promising not to engage in disciplinary proceedings against Jewish party members for affiliation with synagogues or Jewish organisations that support Israel. Given that the majority of British synagogues could be described as Zionist by some definition, this was effectively a declaration that observant Jews were no longer welcome in the party. Nothing like this has been seen in British society for a century.
As a country, we are running up against hard limits to how far we can manage decline and stifle unrest. The patience of the public, the confidence of markets and the state’s own capacity to enforce order are all reaching breaking point. Britain is indeed on the brink of ruin.
But what does ruin look like? Writing three years ago, and looking ahead to a likely Labour government, I warned that temporary disasters can become long term realities: “Argentina, a country economically competitive with the USA in 1900, proceeded to politically wreck itself for over a hundred years, with cyclical economic crises destroying hard-won prosperity. In Argentina, the situation of the ‘precariat’ is all that most of today’s middle-class families have ever known.”
The end of colonial Africa
Celina reviews a 1960s film I’d never heard of, and having read her review I can understand why it has been forgotten because it tells a brutal tale as the colonial European powers withdrew from their former colonies in Africa far too often leaving the newly independent peoples to settle old scores in bloody civil conflicts:
The 1966 Italian documentary Africa Addio (Goodbye Africa), directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi of Mondo Cane fame, is a must-see for absolutely anyone who wants to understand the realities of African governance. Filmed in Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Rwanda, Angola, the Belgian Congo, and South Africa between 1963 and 1965, Africa Addio captures the bloody upheavals accompanying the end of White colonial rule across much of the continent. It chronicles the withdrawal of the British and Belgian colonial powers, alongside Portugal’s efforts to retain its African colonies and White South Africans’ determination to preserve their rule.
The film itself is bewildering at moments, for much of the film a camera is mounted in a light aircraft, capturing the serenity of the azure waters and brilliant white sands of the Zanzibar archipelago. The visual splendour of the landscape is overwhelming in its beauty, it evokes the pristine imagery of a mid-century travelogue designed for European consumption.
Nevertheless, as the aircraft gradually descends, the white sands are revealed to be peppered by dark, irregular shapes. As the telephoto lens finds its focus, the visual abstraction resolves into a horrifying, incontrovertible reality. The idyllic beaches are entirely strewn with the corpses of hundreds of Arab and Indian civilians, the victims of the January 1964 Zanzibar Revolution.
Screenshot from the film Africa Addio. 19 January 1964. Arab civilians attempting to flee revolutionaries.
Screenshot from the film Africa Addio. 20 January 1964. Bodies of Arab civilians at low tide, caught while trying to flee Zanzibar.
Accompanying this almost god-like, detached aerial survey of mass slaughter is the melancholic, and achingly beautiful orchestral score of the celebrated Italian composer Riz Ortolani.
This startling juxtaposition, which is only one of many in the film, feels immensely unsettling with the sheer, unfathomable scale of human atrocity paired with the romantic elegance of European orchestration. It encapsulates the disturbing essence of Africa Addio.
The opening sections focus primarily on Kenya. We see a series of trials of Mau Mau terrorists and their accomplices, who massacred White families and mutilated their cattle, and for some inexplicable reason also tortured and hung wild baboons. Most were sentenced to life in prison for these egregious crimes. A few years later, Jomo Kenyatta, the anti-colonial activist who served as Kenya’s Prime Minister from 1963 to 1964, pardoned the Mau Mau criminals.
[…]
If you decide to watch Africa Addio today, you will subject yourself to a gruelling, psychologically taxing endurance test of historical horror. The film explicitly positions itself as a visual archive of decolonisation in motion, capturing the violent and often utterly merciless transition from European empire to African independence.
After watching this film, you realise that it is a genuine civilisational artefact, yet somehow it still feels wrong to watch. It forces the viewer to confront the terrifying speed with which order can evaporate when a European hegemon suddenly withdraws. Through its seemingly endless catalogue of massacres, mercenary warfare, political assassinations, and ecological devastation, Africa Addio becomes an uncompromising mirror of the anxieties surrounding the collapse of the European imperial order.
[…]
The film highlights the horrific brutality of the new African order emerging across the continent. In conflicts such as the Congo rebellion, insurgents receiving Soviet-bloc or Communist Chinese support terrorised White civilians. Nevertheless, the violence depicted in Africa Addio does not end with Whites fleeing for safety from the militant communist backed African hordes: it extends to the massacre of other ethnic and political enemies.
In Zanzibar, the targets were Arabs who were associated collectively with the island’s history of slavery and Arab domination. In January 1964, the newly independent government was overthrown in a revolution involving pro-communist forces, followed by the massacre of thousands of Arab civilians. Some estimates place the death toll as high as 20,000, although the precise number remains disputed. Historian Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim explicitly argues that these killings constituted genocide, and that their recognition has been obstructed by the political narratives surrounding African liberation.
October 10, 2026
Denouncing great art of the past as “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”
Not content with reading history backwards to find fault with historic figures based on the most progressive views of the modern world, the same approach is now taken with fine art:
For a discipline devoted to art, contemporary art history can seem remarkably contemptuous about the object of its study. In the 1970s “new art history” began to revolutionise a discipline that was hitherto focused on the connoisseurship of the Western canon.
It became instead a subject that used artworks as artefacts for social and political critique. John Berger, the pioneer of the new approach, questioned the very permissibility of having a “love of art”, dismissing it as “a useful concept to the European ruling classes”.
New art historians have since continued this crusade, with different “lenses”, each now well known, encompassing such topics as the “feminist turn”, the “de-colonialist turn”, the “LGBTQ+ turn”, and so on.
As critics such as Lola Salem and Pierre d’Alancaisez have argued in this magazine, this tendency now extends beyond academic fashion: the assumptions through which art is studied have migrated into museums, funding bodies and cultural institutions, where they shape what is exhibited, how it should be interpreted, and what socioeconomic purposes art is expected to serve.
The old question, “Is this good art, and what does it tell us about the civilisation that made it?” has acquired a formidable set of competitors: “What makes this work and its creator suspect, what depravity does is its supposed beauty trying to hide?”
In Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art, Daisy Dixon’s sense of contempt is made plain in the very first line: “When I was a teenager, I hated the painter Paul Gauguin.” As assistant professor of Philosophy at Cardiff, Dr Dixon has built a social media platform as an outspoken critic of historical and contemporary visual media. Not even Miriam Margolyes is spared her rancour.
In a world now dominated by AI, Dixon tackled the very real issue of deepfake pornography, where this new technology was abused by perverts to create pornographic images of victims (mostly women) without their consent. Whilst Dixon’s criticism of this sinister practice was laudable and justified, the extension of her criticism to art is misguided and regrettable.
The indignant chapter titles of her book — Obscenity, Criminality, Oppression, Malevolence, Cruelty, Iconoclasm, Reparation — read more like the call-to-arms of the culture wars than a work of fair and rigorous academic analysis. At the heart of her book lies the accusation that art with an erotic element by the likes of Titian, Velázquez or Giulio Romano should be considered “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”.
To support her argument, Dixon begins outside the confines of art with a work of literature: Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Using the indisputable “depravity” of De Sade, she aims to justify her accusation that those paintings were motivated by the same male and depraved roots in Western culture.
Her greatest ire however is reserved for Titian’s Rape of Europa, which she considers “just a portrayal of an immoral act”. The failure to consider any alternative meaning to the picture is indicative of the reductive and misleading nature of her approach.
Titian’s The Rape of Europa, c. 1560-62.
Wikimedia Commons.
Without delving further into the many other readings of the Rape of Europa, suffice it to say that the reductive conclusions drawn by Dixon impede us from a deeper understanding that might call her assumptions into question.
Although I read Art History at one of the most renowned institutes in Britain, I can confirm that students are taught this superficial understanding and contempt. I remember a senior lecturer singling out the experience of finding a group of Oxford postgrads discussing Titian’s Diana and Actaeon as a scene worthy of ridicule. “I was shocked,” the lecturer opined, “how they were so busily discussing which translation of Ovid that Titian consulted, when they completely ignored that there was a black slave girl in the picture.”
The girl depicted was one of the handmaidens of Diana, something the lecturer would have known had she even the most elementary knowledge of the story. More distressing was the sight of a senior academic masquerading assumptions as fact.
October 9, 2026
British humour – “there is something unique about ‘taking the mickey'”
This post is from a few months ago, but still seems quite relevant to British society (admittedly, I’m not there and perhaps things are actually better than they appear from across the pond):
Image from Fish & Chips
Last week, the BBC announced it would be axing Live At the Apollo. Its viewing figures have halved since 2018. I turned on the TV to see what we’d be missing. It was compered by a guy whose idea of being droll was to shout. The comedians he introduced were “safe” — in the way that sticking a cork up your bottom is safe.
In order to get BBC Purity Vetting clearance, Apollo ceased to be Comedy.
Wooden jollity, enforced on us by puritans, is not the real Britain. Being sharply satirical, frivolously inane, or anywhere in between — that is who we are and what we want to watch. Rather like Baldrick, it’s all part of a cunning plan. Our humour is conduit for the House Rules of Britishness.
The self-deprecation. The puncturing of pomposity. The airing of societal concerns through a keenly observed joke. The tension-releasing giggle of the naughty-but-nice. The feel-good factor of unadulterated silliness — from Bob Mortimer right back to Saint Eric of Morecambe.
Yes, in its many forms, British humour is the window to our soul. And yet the Pigeons of Political Correctness have come and dropped their payload all over it.
What a mess they’ve made. On our screens and off, the fear of causing offence suppresses our greatest and most cohering natural instinct. In the mini survey I mentioned in Fish & Chips Portion One, we found that humour was by some distance thought to be the most quintessential British trait. Among things like chatting in the pub, walking the dog, respectfully disagreeing and helping a neighbour, “seeing the funny side” came top. It is our coping mechanism; our way of keeping calm and carrying on. It is what we are admired for. In the once noble pursuit of social justice; of balancing things up a bit – our humour police are creating a whole new imbalance. It is topsy turvy social engineering in which only the “weak” are “strong”. There must be a zany new Monty Python sketch in there somewhere.
A respondent in our survey was spot on when he said: “Sense of humour in the managerial/professional class has gone … not necessarily normal people“.
So it’s time that we “normal people” clean all that crap off the window. The pigeons won’t do it, will they? They”re too busy cooing about Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. It is up to us to make the penny drop for them. To see that what they are trying to do is unnatural. Because in Middle England, there will always be the surreal, the satirical, and the smutty innuendo.
October 8, 2026
Singapore’s journey from British colony to independent economic star
At The Wrong Side of History, Ed West reviews the autobiography of Lee Kuan Yew, the first prime minister of an independent Singapore and the man most responsible for its amazing economic success:
There are few political memoirs as readable as Lee Kuan Yew’s From Third World to First, but then there were few politicians like him. Arguably the greatest statesman of the post-war era, Lee led Singapore out of a failed federation with Malaysia, turning a poor and precarious little nation into a dazzling success story, now twice as rich as Britain, its former colonial ruler.
While many things have been written about Lee, the most interesting are by the man himself, with his early years covered in The Singapore Story, published in 1998. The sequel mixes memoir, analysis on international affairs, his own personal philosophy and a how-to guide to statecraft. As he puts it: “There are books to teach you how to build a house, how to repair engineers, how to write a book. But I have not seen a book on how to build a nation out of a disparate collection of immigrants from China, British India, and the Dutch East Indies …” It’s safe to say that he’s cornered that particular market.
It is a strangely cinematic story, almost fit for Hollywood: a man battling to save his small nation against the odds, who must feel that all is lost but struggles on and ultimately wins. Singapore’s identity, unlike that of most young countries, was not forged on the battlefield with swords and guns, but by markets, driven by a determined belief in economic growth, social order and hard work. Only these goals would allow it to overcome its severe demographic challenges, and avoid the violent fate of many post-colonial societies. Defying what experts thought was the direction of history, it became the most successful, and significant, city-state since the Renaissance.
The situation to start with was desperate, and Lee can be seen crying in black and white video footage from August 1965, when he announces that his city has been kicked out of Malaysia, a rare case of a state achieving independence against its will. As he puts it: “Some countries are born independent. Some achieve independence. Singapore had independence thrust upon it.”
Singapore was poor and cursed by its combustible demography. Twice the size of the Isle of Wight — and roughly the same shape — it nestles at the bottom of the Malay peninsula and to its south, just an hour’s ferry ride, is the giant of Indonesia. Neither neighbour was friendly, and Indonesia’s declared regional policy of Konfrontasi – Confrontation – was not reassuring.
Under Stamford Raffles in 1819, the British had founded Singapore as a trading post out of a collection of villages inhabited by Malays and a long-established community of overseas Chinese. Its position at a choke point was crucial for control of the sea lanes between the Far East and Indian Ocean, and under British rule it flourished as an entrepôt. Free trade was its foundational belief, and its hands-off rulers allowed the Chinese in particular to express their entrepreneurial skills; as its economy grew, Chinese migration increased, and by the time of independence they constituted about three-quarters of the population, with Malays accounting for 15 per cent and Indians the remainder.
Born in 1923 as the eldest of five, Lee was something of a father figure to his three brothers and sister, their actual father being a somewhat irresponsible and distant figure, and he certainly exemplified Adler’s birth-order theory, becoming the conscientious elder sibling to an entire nation.
The great-grandson of Hakka-speaking immigrants, Lee came from the somewhat Anglicised Straits Chinese elite. Often British in their mindset, Lee describes himself as “the last Victorian” and this worldview would shape Singapore’s history. He attended the English-speaking Raffles College, where he met his future wife, Kwa Geok Choo, another lawyer and a formidable individual in her own right; the two often finished first and second in exams.
Lee would have gone on to great things in any case, but he happened to come of age in a notably turbulent period. If worldviews are indeed shaped by the events of an individual’s twentieth year, for the budding young law student it was the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the British Empire’s greatest defeat and humiliation. Lee noted at the time that, whatever happened next, this was the end of European rule.
Dining on the Supersonic Concorde
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 14 Apr 2026Roasted lobster tails with creamy beurre blanc served with smoked salmon roses with caviar
City/Region: France
Time Period: 1970sThe luxury dining experience that came with the exorbitant price tag of a ticket aboard the supersonic airliner Concorde (about $9,000 in 2026 money for a one-way ticket from New York to London) included an exclusive lounge experience at the airport and continued with a multi-course meal in the air.
Here I’m recreating a dish from a photo aboard Concorde of smoked salmon shaped into roses, garnished with crème fraîche and caviar. The caviar served aboard Concorde would have been beluga, of course, but feel free to opt for a more reasonably priced alternative. I used white sturgeon caviar, which was still a bit of a splurge.
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October 7, 2026
Lessons from Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander
As a child, I was a very early fan of C.S. Forester’s series of novels on the career of Horatio Hornblower, so I was a bit wary about reading Patrick O’Brian’s new-to-me stories set in the same period. A friend from Halifax practically forced Master and Commander on me during my first visit to Nova Scotia and I quickly picked up Post Captain, HMS Surprise and a few more in the series. At Athena’s Bridge, Mike Hennelly makes the case that there are valuable leadership lessons that can be learned from O’Brian’s work:
Cover from a later printing than the one I read in 1982.
In the study of leadership, there are many who say that there is nothing to be gained from novels or movies. Their argument is that only the study of reality (real CEOs, real generals, real political leaders) will yield insights of value for the study and practice of leadership. The purpose of this essay is to argue the opposite case. One of the most remarkable literary achievements of the 20th century was Patrick O’Brian’s multi-volume depiction of British naval life during the Napoleonic Wars. Eventually stretching to twenty books, O’Brian gives us the lives of Captain Jack Aubrey and his great friend, Doctor Stephen Maturin. A reviewer from the New York Times stated (rather categorically) that O’Brian’s books are “the best historical novels ever written”. O’Brian’s characters finally appeared in a movie entitled Master & Commander and the film faithfully captures much of the atmosphere and spirit of this maritime world.
O’Brian’s world, both in the books and the movie, is surprisingly faithful to the world of the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. He brings to life the nature of the great naval leaders of the time, the victories they achieved and the hardships they endured. As O’Brian himself notes, “I have gone straight to the source for the fighting in this book. I have log-books, official letters, contemporary accounts or the participants’ own memoirs“. What follows is not a review of the movie nor a synopsis of the plot. This is an essay that uses one particular movie to frame a discussion of leadership in realistic, uncertain and risky circumstances. Our focus is the character of Jack Aubrey – created by Patrick O’Brian, visualized by director Peter Weir and brought to life by actor Russell Crowe. An examination of Aubrey’s behavior and attitudes throughout the movie provides a wealth of insight into the mystery that is called leadership.
To begin at the beginning, a consideration of the term “master and commander” brings two curious facts to light. First of all, in the early days of the Royal Navy, this term applied to two people – not one. When English warships fought the Spanish Armada, for example, they had a “master” who was a life-long mariner with the nautical experience to sail the ship and a “commander” (frequently a noble) who was entrusted with the combat performance of the ship. Over time, this phrase was combined and came to describe the responsibilities of a warship’s captain. The second curious fact is that this term (as a job description) is incomplete. When Patrick O’Brian brought the character of Captain Jack Aubrey to life, he did so in a way that clearly shows that the term “master and commander” was an incomplete description of a captain’s responsibilities. HMS Surprise might be a ship (that needed a master to sail her) and she might be a weapon of war (that needed a commander to fight her) but she was also a collection of almost two hundred sailors of all sorts (who needed a leader to direct and influence their actions). To carry out all the responsibilities of a ship’s captain, Jack Aubrey needed to be a “master, commander and leader”. Without the ability to take a random set of landsmen and mold them into a cohesive, disciplined and skilled crew, he would not have been able to sail the ship safely nor would he have been able to exert any combat power.
“She’s a vastly heavier ship. She’s out of our class” (or, how leaders get others to face existential risk)
As the movie begins, it is the spring of 1805 and we are aboard HMS Surprise, a small Royal Navy frigate of 28 guns with a crew of 197 souls. The Surprise is under orders to find the French frigate Acheron and “sink, burn or take her as a prize”. The Surprise is off the coast of Brazil and approaching a fogbank when she is ambushed by the Acheron. Captain Aubrey is energized by the prospect of combat (“straight at ’em, Mr. Mowatt!“) but events soon take a turn for the worse as Surprise‘s rudder is shot away and the British barely escape safely into the fog.
We learn more about Aubrey as he faces a serious leadership challenge after this disastrous encounter with the French. The ship’s officers, somewhat in shock, are discussing the engagement and they observe that Acheron was “more like a ship of the line than a frigate” and “our shots couldn’t penetrate“. Their misgivings are understandable. HMS Surprise, with twenty-eight guns, is about as small as a ship can be and still be called a frigate. The forty-four guns of the Acheron make it far larger and more heavily armed than the Surprise and what this means in combat is that every broadside fired by the Acheron is almost four times the weight of a broadside from the Surprise. Aubrey’s command team assumes that the clear superiority of the French ship means the Surprise will have to abandon her mission and head home. But their misgivings are not in line with the attitudes of a) the British Admiralty, b) the British public and c) their captain. At this point in the war, most Britons and the Admiralty operate under the assumption that their navy should always project an aura of invincibility. This has been a British naval characteristic since the great British sea-victories at Camperdown (1797) and the Nile (1798). Furthermore, we find out that Jack Aubrey’s mental model of an ideal officer is Lord Nelson who was famous for his relentlessly aggressive behavior at sea. One of Nelson’s most famous sayings was “no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy” and that is exactly what Aubrey intends to do to the Acheron. Aubrey quickly disabuses his officers of the idea of abandoning their mission. Positively radiating with decisiveness, he tells them there is not a moment to lose if they are to carry out repairs and catch up with the French.
Aubrey faces two challenges as he attempts to lead his ship into a situation of existential risk. First, he must gain the support of his officers and secondly, he must ensure the willingness of his crew. He addresses these concerns in turn. To gain the support of his officers and bolster their morale, he addresses their concerns with a discussion of battle tactics in a way that provides reassurance. Although the French ship has far more guns, Aubrey explains that the Surprise possesses intangible advantages that level the killing field. He is convinced that the Surprise is more maneuverable than the Acheron and he intends that his gun crews be better-trained and more effective than their French counterparts. Without any further dissent from his officers, the Surprise carries on with its pursuit of the bigger and more powerful enemy ship – which is a testament to the effectiveness of Aubrey’s leadership.
Aubrey’s approach to the crew about the threat of the Acheron is intensely practical in nature. The crew spend much of their time engaged in gunnery drill. Captain Aubrey has very high standards for the ship’s gunnery because he expects his gun crews to be both fast and accurate. Accuracy in naval gunfire is always a challenge because ships are inherently unstable firing platforms, but, in addition, the faster the rate of fire, the sooner a gun crew is exhausted with a corresponding reduction in accuracy. Aubrey’s standards, while achievable, are higher than the standard in naval fleets of the time. His standards require intensive, dangerous training which is the only way to produce highly disciplined and effective gun crews. To keep his crew motivated while they are training so hard, Aubrey gives them a rousing talk (Do you want to see a guillotine in Piccadilly? NO!, they roar back. Do you want your children to have to sing “La Marseillaise”? NO!). He also states his expectations in terms that every sailor can grasp – the gun crews of the Surprise must be able to fire two broadsides for every broadside fired by the Acheron. Over time, the crew of the Surprise is welded into a cohesive and effective fighting force; they take pride in their achievements and their confidence grows as they face the prospect of future combat.
USAF re-evaluating the risks of stationing aircraft in Al Biriṭāniyā
The US military leadership got an unwelcome security wake-up call after a reported incident adjacent to a Royal Air Force base used by USAF B-1 bombers:
USAF B-1B Lancer takes off on a routine mission from Ellsworth AFB, South Dakota. Carrying the largest payload of both guided and unguided weapons in the Air Force inventory, the multi-mission Lancer is the backbone of America’s long-range bomber force.
USAF photo by Senior Airman Michael B. Keller via Wikimedia Commons.
To say that the reporting of the last few days about the sudden departure of our B-1B bombers from RAF Fairford has been frustrating — for me at least — is an understatement.
Airfield security has been a pebble in my shoe for a very long time. I assume everyone is familiar with my post from 11 months ago a bout the wake-up call at Whitman AFB? If not, give it a read, then come back.
Let’s all get our reference point first from last week.
Five men who were arrested on suspicion of explosive and terrorism offences after a major incident was declared at an RAF airbase in the west of England have been released on police bail.
Three vans were spotted near RAF Fairford in the early hours of Sunday morning and the police were called. A major incident was declared, and everyone in the small village of Whelford was evacuated.
The head of Counter Terrorism Policing has stressed that the five men remain under investigation and must adhere to strict bail conditions. It has since come to light that the first of two 999 calls was made by one of the arrested men.
A dual UK-Iranian national, aged 25, has also since been arrested on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts.
Investigators are exploring “multiple lines of enquiry”, Assistant Commissioner Laurence Taylor said on Monday, including whether proxies or individuals were working on behalf of a foreign state — knowingly or not.
Like all professionals do, let’s go to the map room.
This is what the geometry looks like.
OK. Soak that in a bit. Whelford is one of the few little residential areas around this base where our literally irreplaceable heavy bombers were operating from. The parking apron they are using? There it is, right around where the “RAF Fairford” label is.
Now, let’s give you some scale. The smaller circle is 500 yards from where the vans and “fellas” were. The larger circle is 1,000 yards.
Put on your force protection hat. Remember Operation Spider Web from over a year ago and what it was warning us about?
I know for a fact that there has been a rather heated argument over whether we are simply taking too many risks with some of our “There’s nothing dangerous about this airfield! Why, four generations of my family have been flying out of here“. attitude. Habits, inertia, etc.
We Americans make some assumptions about distance that is simply not a reality overseas, especially in Europe.
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Why do British trains still rely on century-old levers?
Tom Scott
Published 8 Jun 2026At National Rail’s Manchester classroom, I learn why it’s very rare for trains to collide … and try out signalling for real.
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October 6, 2026
Humour and the British Green Party
In the Daily Sceptic, Steven Tucker discusses the state of comedy in Britain today, in the light of the recent Green Party internal report on what members are supposed to deem funny or not funny. Not joking:
In the very same week these letters were publicised, the UK Green Party did actually launch its own internal in-depth report on what was and was not funny, with party activists receiving training informing them they should maintain detailed records of any jokes fellow members had told to them, “including dates, times [and] locations”, in case anyone later found them to be offensive – particularly if they touched upon sensitive issues like race, religion, sexuality or class. Even if the particular big fat black lesbian affected made a joke about themselves, this was still to be noted down and eliminated, as it nonetheless created “an environment in this space where derogatory jokes are allowed to happen”.
To prevent such jocular genocide occurring again in future, Greens were advised to perform an “audit” of their friendship groups to ensure they were diverse enough so that this simply would not happen: an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman all walk into a pub, and nobody says anything even remotely untoward whatsoever, as diversity is clearly our strength.
Official Green Party advice on what to do if you happen to hear a joke one day. Nowhere does the option “laugh” appear
For a preview of what a future Green-led Ministry of Laughter might one day look like, we should look towards a current controversy involving the quasi-state-run BBC (Bowdlerising British Comedy), which in September decided to mark 20 years since the first broadcast of award-winning sketch-show That Mitchell and Webb Look – by cutting out several sketches, and deeming the show to be “racist”. The now samizdat sketches involved scenarios like English Civil War re-enactors getting bored and deciding to black up and recreate modern-day conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a brownface Amazonian tribe found secretly living behind flower-pots in a garden centre and a woman wearing a burka being an unsuccessful participant in a TV makeover programme.
Even more primly, the BBC also wiped or butchered entire episodes of popular children’s comedy history series Horrible Histories, as they featured jokes about sensitive topics like slavery – despite the fact they pretty obviously were not of a “Let’s bring it back!”-type perspective, but attempting to satirise the practice’s brutality.
One horrified reaction came from Graham Linehan, the cancelled Anglo-Irish comedy writer who today lives in exile in America, as nobody in the UK industry will now touch his work with a bargepole. Not only does it commit the cardinal post-2010s sin of actually being funny, Linehan’s writing is also deemed to be “transphobic”; Channel 4 refuses to re-show an old episode of his sitcom the IT Crowd, as it features a joke about a cross-dresser (see my review of his 2023 autobiography).
Writing in the Telegraph, Linehan observes that most British comedians who get their back-catalogues politically ruined these days, like Mitchell and Webb, either keep silent and go along with it for an easy life, or else actively denounce themselves in classic Soviet show-trial fashion, so as to keep raking in the cash on the panel-show circuit. Because of this cowardice, he says, “somewhere out there, the next generation of comedy writers and performers, the ones who might have pushed the form further, taken bigger risks, made the joke nobody else would touch, will quietly decide it isn’t worth it, and nobody will have to ban anything ever again”. Sounds a bit like how Islam operates in such matters, too …
The Great Exhibition shows Victorians were anything but “stuffy”
That’s not to say they didn’t like accumulating “stuff”, however, as the Great Exhibition was in many ways a celebration of “stuff”:
The Crystal Palace from the northeast during the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Image from the 1852 book Dickinsons’ comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 via Wikimedia Commons.
One wonders whether enough time will ever elapse for our Victorian ancestors to break free from the prevailing stereotype that they were demure, dull, prudish, obsessed with death and weirdly repressed. Still, a full 125 years after the death of the eponymous Queen, “Victorian” remains a word synonymous with “stuffy”, “insular”, “puritanical” and “sanctimonious”.
Despite many attempts at historiographical rehabilitation, the popular conceptualisation of the Victorians sadly remains the same. The truth, however, as A.N. Wilson proves yet again with The Wise and Their Works — his latest foray into the age of Empire and top hats — is far more colourful.
Wilson’s subject is the Great Exhibition of 1851, which famously brought the whole world to Britain’s door for one giddy summer, to see the accumulated ingenuity of 19th-century manufacturers crammed under the vast glass roof of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. The east half of the building was given over to foreign exhibits, the west to British curiosities. That this was a quite coherent and acceptable division of spoils tells us something about Britain’s status as technological and political hegemon at the time.
The Exhibition was an epic testament to Victorian production and scientific experimentation. Within and without the exhibition hall, visitors could gawk at giant lumps of coal, pearls from Aberdeenshire and china clay from Cornwall. Glittering above all this raw material was the most valuable gem ever dug from the earth, the now controversial Koh-i-Noor diamond. Apparently, it wasn’t shiny enough or big enough for our supercilious Victorian brethren. Such valuable nuggets give us an insight into what eventually did for the Victorians: they were always wanting more.
Part of the point of the Great Exhibition was that the human ingenuity on display outdazzled even the wonders of the natural world. There were innumerable clocks, cameras and barometers, a printing machine capable of churning out five thousand copies of the Illustrated London News an hour, a steam hammer that could crack an egg on its lightest setting or forge a warship’s bearings on its heaviest, alongside such delightful curiosities as a collapsible piano built for yacht cabins.
Even Queen Victoria found the siamese piano with two players at each end a step too far, but I suspect it’s the sort of thing that would go viral overnight on TikTok today. It is perhaps by focusing on their obsession with the weird that we can learn that the Victorians were not so different to us after all.
There can be no better guide to the Exhibition and broader era than Wilson — a veritable time traveller and arch-Victorian himself, whose acclaimed biographies of Victoria, Albert and Dickens, as well as his more contentious life of Charles Darwin and his superb general histories, all point to a man for whom the 19th century remains a never-ending source of inspiration. This lively narrator is a boon in a history that can feel acute in scope at times.
And Wilson doesn’t beat around the bush: the Exhibition was in his words, “a monument to consumerism”. And 19th-century consumerism was not without its dark underbelly. On display, in a detail that wreaks havoc upon cosy nostalgia, were shackles and leg irons manufactured in Birmingham for export to the slave-owning American South.
As much fun as this time-travelling escapade proves to be, wandering the stalls, marvelling at taxidermied frogs, Wilson’s deeper concern lies in the bureaucratic machinery that made the whole enterprise possible. It’s easy to glaze over the grant values, leases, committee votes and acreage negotiations, but it is essential to show exactly how a project of this magnitude could ever come into being.
As Wilson puts it, in one of the book’s loveliest lines, “It is from small things … that some of the most remarkable achievements have grown”. Forget the history buffs, it’s today’s civil servants, project managers and bureaucratic naysayers who have most to learn from the Great Exhibition of 1851.
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October 4, 2026
Jaguar – a case study in brand suicide
The Jaguar E-type was, in my opinion, the best-looking car of the 20th century. It was all downhill from that point, sadly:
Jaguar killed itself. No villain required, no recession to blame, no supply chain disruption to hide behind. Tata Motors bought a fading but salvageable brand in 2008 for $2.3 billion and spent the next fifteen years turning it into a case study in how to destroy capital.
The rebranding campaign of late 2024 was the public execution. Jaguar dropped its leaping cat logo, fired its entire existing customer demographic via press release, and replaced a century of racing heritage with a pastel-colored advertisement featuring zero cars. The marketing team apparently decided the path to profitability ran directly through alienating the people who actually bought Jaguars. Brilliant.
The rebrand was just the visible wound. The rot started earlier. Jaguar spent years producing vehicles with reliability ratings that made Land Rover look like a Swiss watch, while charging Mercedes money for the privilege. The F-Pace, the E-Pace, the I-Pace: each one a beautiful object that dealers apologized for in advance. You bought the badge and got a subscription to your mechanic’s vacation fund.
The pivot to an all-electric lineup, announced with great fanfare in 2021, then delayed, then sort-of-delayed-again, captured everything wrong with a company led by government subsidy chasers rather than engineers. Jaguar chased EV tax credits and green virtue points instead of fixing the fundamental problem. Nobody trusted the cars.
Markets are merciless precisely because they are honest. Customers stopped buying, and no amount of rebranding or regulatory coddling reversed that verdict. Capital allocated to a brand that cannot hold a customer is capital destroyed. Tata learned this lesson expensively. You, having never bought the car, learned it for free.
The ad campaign is just a sign on the door that reads, “This company is woke trash”. The real rot lies beneath the surface. Firing the marketing agency won’t change that.
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Why the Allies Lost the Battle of Gallipoli 1915
The Great War
Published 8 May 2026On April 25, 1915 Australian, British, New Zealand and French forces landed at the mouth of the Dardanelles to capture the Gallipoli peninsular and march on Constantinople. But the Ottoman defenders, including legendary officer Mustafa Kemal, held firm and the Battle of Gallipoli would last for 7 bloody months.
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October 2, 2026
Britain’s best general in World War II
If you’ve been following for a while, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Field Marshal Bill Slim, the best but also least well known British general of the Second World War. His achievements in Burma and India are overshadowed in popular memory by the struggle against the Nazis in Europe and the vast Pacific campaigns against the Japanese by primarily American forces. In recent years, there’s been a bit more attention paid to the XIV Army’s long and bitter fight, but there’s always more to discover about that incredible struggle:
Field Marshal Sir William Slim (1891-1970), during his time as GOC XIVth Army.
Portrait by No. 9 Army Film & Photographic Unit via Wikimedia Commons.
But I see him clear, with that robber-baron face under the Gurkha hat … looking like a rather scruffy private with a general’s tab — which of course is what he was.
– one of General Slim’s soldiers remembers
A search on Amazon using the term “military memoir” yields more than forty thousand results. With so many choices, why read Field Marshal William Slim’s World War II memoir entitled Defeat into Victory? Interestingly enough, there are two answers. The short answer was revealed in 2011 when the National Army Museum in London held a debate and a public poll to answer the question — Who is Britain’s greatest general? Great Britain, of course, has a long and distinguished military history with a great many famous military commanders who could all vie for this honor. In what turned out to be a surprise to many, Field Marshal Slim tied with the Duke of Wellington as the winner. So, if you are considering whether to read Slim’s memoir, ask yourself — how much do you know about someone who might be one of the greatest generals in history?
Before continuing this essay with a longer, more structured answer about the value of Slim’s memoir, a few words about William Slim himself. He began his military career as a temporary lieutenant at the beginning of World War I, without the benefit of a university education or Sandhurst training. By the end of World War I, he had achieved a sterling military record — wounded twice, awarded the Military Cross and temporarily promoted to major. He spent the inter-war years assigned to the Indian Army and was notably associated with the 6th and 7th Gurkha Rifles. At the beginning of World War II, he was given brigade command in East Africa and then command of the 10th Indian Division in the Middle East. His memoir begins in early 1942 when Slim is suddenly and unexpectedly told to leave his command and report immediately to Army Headquarters in India. The summons was so abrupt that Slim thought he was being relieved of command. He didn’t know it at the time but he was about to spend the rest of the war in India and Burma.
A distinct three-act narrative arc forms the structure of his book. In Act I (1942), Slim takes command of Burma Corps. This was an ad hoc two-division force that was in the middle of conducting a fighting retreat while being overwhelmed by the surging Japanese Army. Slim and his men end up suffering through a one hundred day, nine-hundred-mile retreat back to India in what historians have called the longest retreat ever conducted by a British army. By May 1942, the remnants of his Corps finally reached safe haven in India.
In Act II (1943), Slim regroups, retrains and resupplies his forces in preparation for his reconquest of Burma. This was not as straightforward a task as it sounds. Slim now commands the Fourteenth Army which, at its height, consisted of nearly one million soldiers and was one of the largest armies in the world. But the size of the Fourteenth Army was not as striking as the diversity of its composition. Slim had to make a disciplined, cohesive and effective fighting force using regiments from England, Scotland, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya and a vast array of Indian units including Sikhs, Rajputs, Pathans and Gurkhas from Nepal. Later in the war, Slim described a routine tactical operation: “The Japanese had for some time been harassing 28 East African Brigade Group … and a Punjabi battalion had been sent in to stiffen it”. The Japanese counterattacked “and a British battalion was hurriedly transferred from the east bank and joined them”. One routine tactical operation — involving allied soldiers from three continents.
In Act III, (1944-45), Slim and his army return to Burma and achieve triumph after triumph. The first triumph is the battle of Imphal (March-July 1944). The famed novelist George MacDonald Fraser was a young Scottish soldier in Slim’s Fourteenth Army and he later wrote; “I imagine that every teenager today has heard of Stalingrad and Alamein and D-Day but I wonder how many know the name of Imphal … where Japan suffered the greatest catastrophe in its military history”. The subsequent battle of Meiktila (February- March 1945) was equally significant and has been characterized by British military historian Corelli Barnett as, “the cleverest, boldest and most brilliant single British victory in World War II”. By mid-1945, Slim’s victorious Fourteenth Army had retaken Rangoon and destroyed the Japanese army in Burma.
There are three dimensions to Slim’s memoir that make it so memorable. It is a tale well-written, it is a tale of wonder and it is a tale filled with wisdom.
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