Her Majesty's withdrawal from public duties became increasingly apparent in the months prior to her death on September 8, two days after a clearly frail monarch appointed Liz Truss as Prime Minister. She died with the love of her subjects and the respect and admiration of the whole world.

There are kernels of insight in Harvard professor Caroline Elkins’s new book, 'Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire', but far too few to redeem what is otherwise a mess of hyperbole and problematic examples conscripted as illustrations of her argument. After her previous book on Kenya, colonists and empire, what we see in her latest work is a constancy of shoddy scholarship

As Vladimir Putin sees it, Russia is either an empire or it is nothing, with Ukraine the immediate obstacle to this pursuit. His is not a defensive interpretation, but an imperialism central to his goal of a new European order arising not only from territorial change but also according to the logic and utility of force

Jonathan Haslam's 'The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II' is redeemed by its discussion of international relations with a focus on Soviet subversion and Stalin's machinations. It is almost enough to make up for the book's dog-eared cliches and frequent rediscoveries of the wheel

With determination and skill, the Royal Navy was central to ending the slave trade. When fools and race hustlers today violate the trust between generations by ignoring or, worse, misrepresenting the nobility of that crusade, they besmirch the sacrifice of 17,000 seamen who gave their lives in its cause

Empires were, without exception, terrible things, or so the orthodoxy of the Left insists. The disparagement attached to imperial systems, notably those of Britain and Austria-Hungary, appears less grounded, once a fuller range of empires, past, present and future, is considered

For many groups, such as Copts and Jews, empires ruled by the Ottomans, Habsburgs and Britain were frequently more benign than the ethnically based nation-states that succeeded them. The plight of the East African Indians once British rule ended constitutes a clear example

Ian Fleming died suddenly from a heart attack in 1964. […]

German successes against Denmark, Norway, Belgium and France were a product of the geopolitical situation, thanks to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which gave Hitler a free hand in the west. Dunkirk was a defeat, that's true. But Churchill's resolve to fight sowed the seed of victory