The Phoney War was an eight-month period at the outset of World War II during which there were virtually no Allied military land operations on the Western Front. WWII began on 1 September 1939 with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. Two days later, the "Phoney" period began with declarations of war by the United Kingdom and France against Germany, but with little actual warfare occurring.
Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British and American author and journalist. He was the author of 18 books on faith, culture, politics and literature. He was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford with a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as "one of the 'four horsemen'" of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" is still of mark in philosophy and law.
The New Statesman is a British political and cultural news magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney and Beatrice Webb and other leading members of the socialist Fabian Society, such as George Bernard Shaw, who was a founding director. The longest-serving editor was Kingsley Martin (1930–1960), and the current editor is Jason Cowley, who assumed the post in 2008.
Peter Jonathan Hitchens is an English conservative author, broadcaster, journalist, and commentator. He writes for The Mail on Sunday and was a foreign correspondent reporting from both Moscow and Washington, D.C. Peter Hitchens has contributed to The Spectator, The American Conservative, The Guardian, First Things, Prospect, and the New Statesman. His books include The Abolition of Britain, The Rage Against God, The War We Never Fought and The Phoney Victory.
Media Lens is a British media analysis website established in 2001 by David Cromwell and David Edwards. Cromwell and Edwards are the site's editors and only regular contributors. Their aim is to scrutinise and question the mainstream media's coverage of significant events and issues and to draw attention to what they consider "the systemic failure of the corporate media to report the world honestly and accurately".
Clive Sheridan Ponting was a senior British civil servant and historian. In 1984, he leaked classified documents about the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano in the Falklands War in 1982, which showed that government statements about the sinking were untrue. He was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, but argued that his actions were in the public interest, and was acquitted. At the time of his resignation from the civil service in 1985, he was a Grade 5, earning £23,000 per year.
Paul Bede Johnson was a British journalist, popular historian, speechwriter and author. Although associated with the political left in his early career, he became a popular conservative historian.
Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia,, is an English popular historian, journalist and member of the House of Lords. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow in the Hoover Institution in Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer in the New York Historical Society. He was a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 2013 to 2021.
Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom is a continuum of belief ranging from the opposition to certain political policies of the European Union to the complete opposition to the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union. It has been a significant element in the politics of the United Kingdom (UK). A 2009 Eurobarometer survey of EU citizens showed support for membership of the EU was lowest in the United Kingdom, alongside Latvia and Hungary.
The Abolition of Britain: From Lady Chatterley to Tony Blair is the first book by British conservative journalist Peter Hitchens, published in 1999. It examines a period of perceived moral and cultural reform between the 1960s and New Labour's 1997 general election win. Hitchens asserts that the reforms facilitated vast and radical constitutional change under Tony Blair's new government that amounted to a "slow motion coup d'état". The book was cited by Gillian Bowditch in The Times as being a major modern work to dissect "the decline in British morals and manners over the past 50 years", and identified by Andrew Marr in The Observer as "the most sustained, internally logical and powerful attack on Tony Blair and all his works".
God Is Not Great is a 2007 book by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens in which he makes a case against organized religion. It was originally published in the United Kingdom by Atlantic Books as God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion and in the United States by Twelve as God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, but was republished by Atlantic Books in 2017 with no subtitle.
Letters to a Young Contrarian is Christopher Hitchens' contribution, released in November 2001, to the Art of Mentoring series published by Basic Books.
Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World is a book by Patrick J. Buchanan, published in May 2008. Buchanan argues that both World War I and World War II were unnecessary and that the British Empire’s decision to join the wars had a cataclysmic effect globally. One of Buchanan's expressed purposes is to undermine what he described as a "Churchill cult" in America's elite. Buchanan focuses particularly on how Winston Churchill helped influence Britain into the world wars with Germany in 1914 and 1939.
The Broken Compass: How British Politics Lost its Way is the fourth book by British writer Peter Hitchens, published in May 2009. Polemical and partly autobiographical, the book contends that the British political right and left no longer hold firm, adversarial beliefs, but vie for position in the centre, while at the same time overseeing a general decline in British society.
The Rage Against God is the fifth book by Peter Hitchens, first published in 2010. The book describes Hitchens's journey from atheism, far-left politics, and bohemianism to Christianity and conservatism, detailing the influences on him that led to his conversion. The book is partly intended as a response to God Is Not Great, a book written by his brother Christopher Hitchens in 2007.
Bodyguard of Lies is a 1975 non-fiction book on Allied military deception operations during World War II written by Anthony Cave Brown. His first major historical work, it derives its name from a wartime quote of Winston Churchill, and offers a narrative account of aspects of both the Allied and German intelligence operations during the war. The British and American governments resisted Brown's attempts to research the book. Many of the topics were still classified and he was denied access to British war records. The material in the book is predominantly based on oral testimony as well as some American records, declassified toward the end of Brown's research.
Arguably: Essays is a 2011 book by Christopher Hitchens, comprising 107 essays on a variety of political and cultural topics. These essays were previously published in The Atlantic, City Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Newsweek, New Statesman, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and Vanity Fair. Arguably also includes introductions that Hitchens wrote for new editions of several classic texts, such as Animal Farm and Our Man in Havana. Critics' reviews of the collection were largely positive.
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization is a 2008 book by Nicholson Baker about World War II. It questions the commonly held belief that the Allies wanted to avoid the war at all costs but were forced into action by Adolf Hitler's aggression. It consists largely of official government transcripts, newspaper articles, and other documents from the time, with Baker only occasionally interjecting commentary. Baker cites documents that suggest that the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom were provoking Germany and Japan into war and had ulterior motives for participating. He dedicates the book to American and British pacifists of the time who, he states in the book's epilogue, were right all along: "They failed, but they were right."
The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History is a book by British politician, journalist and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, in which he details the life of former Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. It was originally published on 23 October 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton.
The Critic is a monthly British political and cultural magazine. Contributors include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young.
