England

Paul Dean on misbehavior in Shakespeare’s day, from insults to mobs to cross-dressing.

Carl Rollyson on the friends and fights of the author of ‘A Dance to the Music of Time.’

Understanding Jeremy Corbyn's antisemitism.

Evgenia Citkowitz’s The Shades, reviewed

I wish I’d bothered to learn more poetry when I was younger so that I could think beyond Yeats’s done-to-death “Second Coming” when musing about British politics right now. Perhaps in 2018 it is better explained in meme form, as the dog in the burning house muttering “This is fine,” or the sweating…

Did the Duke of Buckingham conspire to kill King James I?

When Theresa May goes down, Jacob Rees-Mogg will be Tory executioner and Tory kingmaker.

Jews worry too much. That seems to be the point of a recent article in the otherwise sensible Economist. Sure, two German rappers won that country’s highest music award by bragging their torsos are “better defined than an Auschwitz inmate’s” and vowing to “make another Holocaust.” But, says the…

British Prime Minister Theresa May took action against the Kremlin on Wednesday when she banished 23 Russian diplomats “who have been identified as foreign intelligence officers” from her nation’s shores. The expulsion was in direct response to the alleged—but “highly likely”—Russian use of an…

London.

If you’ve been following British politics in recent years, you know that one of the reasons Tories have dominated in spite of less-than-stellar leadership is that the Labour party is even worse, having handed over the reins to a bunch of anti-Semitic loons. There’s been a campaign to expel the…

Second Thoughts: London’s Metropolitan Police Service, aka Scotland Yard because its original entrance was located on Great Scotland Yard, is re-considering two rules that seem to have had consequences that could easily have been foreseen.

Since Europeans have taken to professing amazement and horror at the doings of our president, it seems appropriate to tell then what amazes us about their doings.

Darkest Hour is a movie about the first three weeks of Winston Churchill’s premiership in May 1940, and it is balderdash. In a razor-sharp National Review critique, Kyle Smith takes out after the movie for shrinking Churchill “down to a more manageable size” by portraying him as undergoing an…

All politics aspires to the condition of entertainment. At least it does so these days, whether in London or in Washington. The British derive enjoyment from their national dramas, even when things go wrong—Dunkirk was the film of the summer. But that multi-series extravaganza known as Brexit makes…

Manchester, England

There was a time when I was surprised that many Americans—even fans of Turner Classic Movies—seemed to think that Alfred Hitchcock was a roly-poly Englishman who somehow ended up in Hollywood and got his start making movies there. The way the story goes, Hitchcock crossed the pond and made Rebecca…

Weeks after Germany’s Cabinet announced a plan to fine social media companies over their users “hate speech” and amid efforts to push similar restrictions across the European Union, authorities are cracking down on individuals whom they have deemed to have crossed a line. The New York Times…

York, England

York, England

"It is time to say, enough is enough," Theresa May announced on Sunday morning, as forensic teams were examining the sites of the Islamist attacks on London Bridge and Borough Market and armed police were raiding homes in east London. "We cannot, and must not, pretend that things can continue as…

Editor's note: This piece has been updated to reflect developing news.

George Osborne, Britain's longtime Chancellor of the Exchequer until the fall of the Cameron government, seems to have raised some eyebrows recently with his announcement that, beginning in May, he will become editor of the [London] Evening Standard. And keep his seat in the House of Commons.

In the vivid and varied world of 19th-century British literature, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) endures as a striking footnote. He produced 250 essays published in 21 volumes, along with dabbling in fiction, yet is known today—to the extent he's known at all—for one book, an 1822 memoir of…

In the vivid and varied world of 19th-century British literature, Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) endures as a striking footnote. He produced 250 essays published in 21 volumes, along with dabbling in fiction, yet is known today—to the extent he's known at all—for one book, an 1822 memoir of…

Fundamentally, the world of sensory experience is raw and ruthless. Chaos abounds, and events flow into one another without rhyme or reason. There are no clear beginnings or endings; no sense of triumph or despair. There is no Heaven or Hell. At its most innocent, the human mind is overwhelmed…

Fundamentally, the world of sensory experience is raw and ruthless. Chaos abounds, and events flow into one another without rhyme or reason. There are no clear beginnings or endings; no sense of triumph or despair. There is no Heaven or Hell. At its most innocent, the human mind is overwhelmed…

In its Great Battles series, Oxford University Press has published studies of Waterloo, Gallipoli, Alamein, Agincourt, and Hattin—the battle Saladin won that enabled him to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The latest entry in this series focuses on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on…

In its Great Battles series, Oxford University Press has published studies of Waterloo, Gallipoli, Alamein, Agincourt, and Hattin—the battle Saladin won that enabled him to recapture Jerusalem from the Crusaders. The latest entry in this series focuses on the Battle of Culloden, which took place on…

Birmingham, England

This was not how the cautious, self-disciplined Prime Minister Theresa May was supposed to sound. "Yesterday I laid out the first step of an ambitious plan to set Britain on the path to being the great meritocracy of the world," she wrote in the September 9 Daily Mail. "It is a vision of a Britain…

This was not how the cautious, self-disciplined Prime Minister Theresa May was supposed to sound. “Yesterday I laid out the first step of an ambitious plan to set Britain on the path to being the great meritocracy of the world," she wrote in the September 9 Daily Mail. "It is a vision of a Britain…

Americans always profess to be shocked that our fellow Americans—well, many of them, anyway—seem to take an inordinate interest in the comings and goings of the British royal family. When, for example, Prince Harry or the Duchess of Cambridge, or any one of their better-known relatives sets foot on…

A little over 30 years ago, three generations of the McMartin family, who had run a nursery school in Los Angeles for decades, were arrested, jailed, and put on trial, charged with hundreds of sensational counts of child sexual abuse. Six years later, when no convictions had been obtained, all…

On June 15, 1215, a band of frustrated and rebellious nobles forced King John to sign a “Great Charter” at Runnymede, a swampy field twenty miles west of London. At the time, few would have suspected the importance of the document, which was annulled by the Pope a mere nine days later.

Friday morning, David Cameron returned to Downing Street as Britain's prime minister. After a campaign of unsurpassed tedium, the General Election came alive last night with the first exit poll, and a Conservative victory out of nowhere. For weeks, the incumbent Conservatives and the Labour…

Westminster Abbey announced on Twitter that it's flying its flag at half staff after the death of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Today, America bids farewell to the Magna Carta. The 800-year old document returns home to Lincolnshire, England, after six months in America. It landed at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in July, and spent the past few months at the Library of Congress.

Hilary Mantel is a bestselling British novelist whose works—mostly historical fiction, or novels and stories with contemporary political overtones—are better known in Great Britain than here. Which is surprising, since the 62-year-old Dame Hilary has a knack for self-publicity.

The Great War did not begin in the trenches, in rain, mud, and dark futility. At first, the fighting was out in the open under blue skies and late summer sunshine. There were bugles and drums, and sometimes the troops even sang when they charged. French officers leading these attacks wore white…

A time bomb does not have to be elegant; it just has to be lethal, primed, and in the right place when the moment comes. Britain’s next general election is set for May 7, 2015. That is likely the day when David Cameron will pay the full price for failing to have defused the revolt on his right.

London

Two truths tend to strike people around middle age: Money buys less than it once did, and manners are in decline. 

The decision by the British government earlier this summer to approve a suite of new technologies that would make possible the creation of human embryos with three genetic parents has brought a long-simmering and seemingly obscure bioethical debate into the public eye, raising questions not only…

Take a visit to the cyber-belly of the beast, to a website run by the European Commission, the EU’s bureaucratic core, and you will be told that “the financial sector was a major cause of the [economic] crisis and received substantial government support.” Soon it will be payback time, in the form…

London

THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with William Kristol on the rise of Margaret Thatcher and the lessons for today's GOP. 

The American position on the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic should be obvious.

Henry IX is one of the most interesting monarchs Britain never had.

Not long ago I was in Boston browsing the stacks of that legendary emporium, the Brattle Book Shop, when I chanced upon Winston Spencer Churchill: Servant of Crown and Commonwealth, a collection of tributes to the parliamentarian, war leader, historian, and wit, which his longstanding English…

Last April’s wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, ubiquitously covered from Westminster Abbey by every medium from satellite to iPhone, served up a reminder that even we in this constitutional republic, where all are equal, can always be counted on to get caught up with the lives of those…

Steven Amarnick reviews Gertrude Himmelfarb's The People of the Book in the Wall Street Journal:

In the last words of this book, the author quotes her brother Milton Himmelfarb in one of his last essays: “Hope is a Jewish virtue.” Nobody embodies that virtue more felicitously than Gertrude Himmelfarb, who over a long and fruitful life of scholarship has given hope to all who have encountered…

Mark Twain once said that it was more interesting to talk to Civil War veterans about battles than to chat with poets about the moon as the versifiers had not ordinarily been to the moon.

"David Brown’s multi-faceted Palmerston,” says a blurb on the back of this volume, “in its archival mastery, scope and insight, outdistances any other.” I thought I detected a note of ambiguity in that verb “outdistances,” and I was right. Brown knows everything it’s humanly possible to know about…

Biography is a form of love affair, the more intense because it can never be consummated. Like lovers, biographers rifle through their subjects’ letters and diaries for evidence of the absent one’s activities and affections. They guard their subject’s reputation and become jealous of rivals. They…

Last week there were four nights of rioting in London and other English towns and cities. I was shocked, but not surprised. The sense of incipient violence and a breakdown of society were high on my list of reasons why I left London and immigrated to the United States three years ago.

"Israeli Prime Minister Gets 29 Standing Ovations in Congress, Sends Message to White House"

The news has flown a bit under the radar here in the United States, for understandable reasons; but the results earlier this week of the Scottish parliament elections are historic. Whether this is good or bad history, of course, remains to be seen. For the first time, and much against the odds and…

Has England lost its nerve?

Never before have matters of the newspaper business mingled so closely with matters of the heart as in Tom Rachman’s superb debut novel. Rachman used to be a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press in Rome, and he still lives there today; so it is fitting that the setting is an international…

Jon L. Breen explains why Patricia Cornwall doesn’t catch Jack the Ripper.