It was John Nance Garner, Franklin Roosevelt’s first vice president, who characterised his office most pithily and dismissively. The formidable Texas Democrat, ‘cactus Jack’, declared that the vice presidency of the United States was ‘not …
Articles by: "Stephen Loosley"
Peter Jackson’s film on the centenary of the Great War, They Shall Not Grow Old, is a masterpiece. Jackson has brought the hostilities of the Western Front of 1914–1918 to vivid life in a brilliantly …
In the wake of the congressional midterms, the United States remains divided electorally and the primary issue continues to be President Donald Trump. American differences are now clearly in evidence in Congress, with Democrats having …
Ronen Bergman has written an extraordinary book which is at once morally confronting and gripping in its narrative. Without the formal assistance of Israel’s intelligence community, including Mossad, Bergman has produced a comprehensive account of …
The new cold war is being fought in cyberspace on a continuing basis and with ever more sophisticated technologies. The Western powers, principally the United States and its allies, confront growing intrusions from adversaries ranging …
This is a superb book. John Lewis Gaddis is a distinguished academic at Yale University, occupying the Robert A. Lovett Professorship of History. He’s a strategic thinker of the first order, having won the Pulitzer …
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph left no one in any doubt as to its view of the death of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin on 5 March 1953. ‘Stalin Dead – Hooray!’ ran the headline on Frank Packer’s tabloid. This …
The dramatic Allied failure in the Norway campaign of April 1940 destroyed Neville Chamberlain as British PM and, ironically, elevated the fiasco’s architect, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Spencer Churchill, to wartime leadership. …
The war in Vietnam is widely perceived to have been the first television war, fought not only on the battlefield but also in the living rooms of America (and Australia). If that thesis is correct, …
For most James Bond devotees, M is the reassuring, somewhat fatherly figure in Ian Fleming’s novels who reluctantly deploys his favourite agent in dangerous, if not deadly, places. Bernard Lee played M wonderfully in the …
Generations of Australians have been told that the Australian Light Horse Regiments, which distinguished themselves from the Sinai to Syria during the Great War, were not Cavalry. They were Mounted Infantry. Jean Bou, an historian …
The great Russian writer, Vladimir Nabokov, probably described VI Lenin best, when he observed that the Bolshevik leader’s ideology was like a pail of milk of human kindness, with a dead rat at the bottom. …