Blog posts
Posted on 28th September, 2025
Incomers seeking to take over, a struggle to keep the nation together and competing ideologies: it’s an old story.
Bernard Cornwell’s political landscape of 10th century Britain is depressing, except that we know things turned out well. In his WARRIOR CHRONICLES, Alfred the Great and his heirs want …
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Posted on 28th September, 2025
BRITAIN HAS AN EXISTENTIAL CRISIS: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM CHINA’S RECOVERY?
My answer to a request to talk about the 2024 book WHO ARE WE, AND HOW WILL WE SURVIVE IN THE AGE OF ASIA? to the Society for Anglo Chinese …
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Posted on 28th September, 2025
WILD SWANS and its author
A speech at the Foundation for the History of Totalitarianism Sixth Form Essay Competition prizegiving, 2024. The subject of the essay that year was WILD SWANS by Jung Chang [Zhang …
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Posted on 4th August, 2025
My Gresham Lectures on Investigative Journalism and on China Through its Media
Recently I have been asked several times to direct people to my Gresham lectures. As they are still very relevant, I now provide the URLs here. Investigative Journalism: A New …
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Posted on 1st August, 2025
Immigrants versus refugees
All my life I have been close to refugee families and known their stories. My mother had worked on the MI9 Atrocities Files in the Second World War, so we …
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Posted on 31st July, 2025
Francis Hutcheson: the greatest Scot?
Although I have written a novel revolving around the issue of moral sense and the origins of altruism (To the River), I did not realize, until reading Arthur Herman’s book …
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