Simon Heffer

The results and approach of England’s Test team shows that the senior leadership must reconnect with the margianlised County Championship

So, Britain prefers tatty paperbacks to handsome, leather-bound treasures? What a cultural tragedy

A bo ut twenty-five years ago, around the turn of the century, I was invited to New Scotland Yard—the legendary headquarters of London’s Metropolitan Police—for lunch with the commissioner. Afterwards, one of his senior lieutenants gave me a tour of the equally legendary Black Museum, where exhibits from nearly two centuries of notorious crimes are displayed. We fell into conversation about how policing had altered in the thirty-five or so years since the senior officer, who was nearing retirement, had joined the Met. Policing changes, he says, because society changes. For example: when he had joined the force, men could be arrested for committing homosexual acts. Now, what two men did with each other in the privacy of their own homes was, provided they were consenting adults, of nobody’s concern but theirs.

Drawing on an eclectic range of influences, Vaughan Williams created the greatest pieces of English music ever written

In her superb new history, Katja Hoyer finds the town of Weimar a perfect microcosm for a country teetering into darkness

As a new film season at the BFI shows, we can read the character of a battered nation and its hopes on the big screen

Childhood adversity and current affairs informed her marvellously absorbing fiction – and a darkly compelling masterpiece in 1949

Despite a career of nearly half a century in public life, Enoch Powell is generally remembered for one utterance only:…

In a disturbing snapshot of today's Britain, the Henry Jackson Society published figures after this month's local elections suggesting that more

Simon Heffer considers the revolt against Vincent Bolloré