Books Podcast

Capitalism and government go hand in hand – one feeding the other Some people think of economic history as a trifle dry, but how can you resist a book that includes quotes like these: “The love of money (as a possession) is… a somewhat disgusting morbidity.” (Keynes). “Capitalism is an economic system, but it's also so much more than that. It's become a sort of ideology, this all-encompassing force that rules over our lives and our minds.”  (Rund Abdelfatah) How many critics of Capitalism can you name? I bet you can only think of a very few. Marx and Engels, I suppose. Keynes. Maybe Thomas Picketty in recent years. But … Continue reading →

Would you kill to be famous? If we want impossible glamour and corruption we could do worse then 1950's Hollywood. A Beautiful Way To Die is a romp of ambition and decadence in which everyone has an agenda and dark secrets. It weaves its magic through carefully-embedded real-life locations and oblique references to real-world Hollywood scandals, telling a lively tale of a dazzling movie star couple, a wannabe starlet, a mystery woman sequestered and brutalised in a sanatorium, a studio fixer and a pill-pushing studio Dr Feelgood. Tim met Eleni Kyriacou at her publishers to explore this exciting milieu, to discuss the significance of the casting couch, and to carefully … Continue reading →

Wot, no Daleks?!? If you had a time machine and could return to 1963 you would be surprised at the haphazard genesis of Dr Who. We think of it today as the eternal jewel in the BBC crown, but the show was curiously unloved by the Corporation in its first long run. It only made it to air by the skin of its teeth, and the Head of Drama, having definitively ruled out any ‘bug-eyed monsters', was livid when The Daleks hove into view. Later, Michael Grade, who hated the show, tried to cancel it and was overruled by the fanbase. John Higgs is a fan – oh, me too! … Continue reading →

They created each other Does the world actually need another Beatles book? There are Mongolian peasants in one-yak villages far outside Ulan Bator who could tell you how John and Paul met at the Woolton Church fete in July 1957, and offer a considered opinion of the relative merits of Revolver and Sgt Pepper. Ian Leslie has performed a marvellous balancing act in telling a story that is in the public domain while bringing a fresh consideration of the relationship between the creative powerhouse of The Beatles. He has listened to Lennon and McCartney's output as if it were a dialogue between them, and while he doesn't go so far … Continue reading →

Strap in, this is going to be quite a ride! 31 October 2023. “Amongst today's HR joys is the report from Emma that a departmental SpAd (Special Adviser) went to an orgy over the weekend and ended up taking a crap on another person's head. To make matters worse, in a separate incident a House employee went to a party dressed as Jimmy Savile and ended up having sex with a blow-up doll. Just another day at the office, I suppose.” Well, it's just another day at the office if you happen to be Chief Whip of His Majesty's government. Simon Hart was Member of Parliament for Camarthen West and … Continue reading →

If you can't see it … is it real? “What does real mean? Is love real? Or magic, or hope, or joy, or the quest for enlightenment? Are any of those things less real just because they're woven in words?… Fairy stories matter. They're how we understand what's true.” Joanne Harris is serenely unconcerned with the subdivisions of literary genre. Her new book is, yes, a fairytale, but one that breaks through into the real world, the world of the Sightless Folk – as the fairy Folk call us. The war between the Daylight Folk and the Midnight Folk is waged, as it were, in the negatives rather than in … Continue reading →

Where are we?!? Why deep South but far North? Why do some maps orient East or South, but never West? When did direction change from being where things came from to where we were going? Is the North Pole a real place? Who gave the cardinal directions their familiar one-syllable names? (It was Charlemagne – it's always Charlemagne.) How do we know which way is which? Jerry Brotton's delightful new book asks and answers such questions on every page. Jerry is a Professor at Queen Mary University in London, so Tim went to compare notes on what it means to be a northerner living in the south. Jerry Brotton – … Continue reading →

What lies within? Every culture places the heart at the centre of personhood. It beats independently of our volition and when it stops we are dead. But if it were no more than a muscular pump it would hardly feature so widely in our visual imagery and iconography. The human heart, Robin Choudhury tells us, has been “…the dwelling place of the soul, the source of life, a furnace or fermentor providing the heat of living bodies, the source of semen and a repository of deeds. It has become the seat of love and desire.” It has fascinated the greatest minds in history and exercised the genius of the finest … Continue reading →

The sins of the mother are visited upon the children The Echoes is many things in Evie Wyld's new novel. It is the rural backwater in Australia where Hannah grew up, and it is also the shape of the book, as the past reverberates down the generations. Philip Larkin said that man hands on misery to man, but for Evie it is mothers who seem to do this. Among the achievements of her novel is to show why they do it and make them sympathetic. And there's another echo. When the novel opens Hannah has made a life for herself in London after returning to the area where her grandmother … Continue reading →

Black holes aren't black! If there is one thing everybody knows about black holes it is that they are so dense that even light can't escape. And yet, as Marcus Chown explains, black holes are some of the most prodigiously luminous objects in space.   So they're not holes. And they're not black. But they are among the most fascinating and counter-intuitive objects in the universe. Not to mention that they are, in Marcus's phrase, “the stuff of physicists' nightmares.” Why? Because the maths tells us that any star a little bigger than the sun will eventually collapse into a singularity – a point of infinite density and infinite temperature. … Continue reading →

You tell yourself “It's OK, it's OK … ” but it's really not! Scarlett Thomas is a tricky novelist to categorise. She has a playful, restless, sleeves-rolled-up approach to writing, in which she seldom ducks the dark turn and the big idea. And you can't doubt her commitment. She once earned an MSc in Ethnobotany by way of research for a book. Tim has been a fan since the intriguing and dazzling The End Of Mr Y. BooksPodcast caught up with her at her publishers in London and sat down to discuss her new book, The Sleepwalkers. Islands, secrets, betrayals, sinister goings-on, ambiguities, night-time chases, a disastrous wedding and a … Continue reading →

The origins of modern death Let's face it – nobody did death like the Victorians. From Highgate Cemetery to the high drama of seances, from Jack the Ripper to Madame Blavatsky, from Waterloo Station to Brookwood Cemetery (there was an actual train!) the Victorians invented our modern response to death, its iconography and its – yes – romance. The advent of industrialisation and the explosive expansion of the great cities had created an unprecedented problem – too many corpses, with all the squalor and disease that came with them. But alongside the practical requirements of disposal there was an increasingly sentimental attitude to the dear departed. For the Victorians, the … Continue reading →

End of Empire History sometimes provides us with neat dividing lines. Queen Victoria helpfully died just weeks into the new century, making way for a new era, but the nightmarish Twentieth Century didn't really get into its stride until the outbreak of the Great War in 1914. Between those landmarks is the Edwardian era. There is apprehension abroad. The nation is anxious about anarchists and terrorists. There is the looming possibility of war. The complacency of the Conservative hegemony is shattered by the Liberal landslide of 1906, not to mention the rise of the Labour Party, and the hangover of the Boer War has raised a question unfamiliar to the … Continue reading →

Being in love is an act of carelessness of your own safety. It's risk! Sam and Lily are middle-aged lovers in Howard Jacobson's new novel and, in bed, they talk as much as anything else. Jacobson is rightly celebrated for his dialogue and, as so often before, it is rich with allusion and steeped in his passion for English literature. The novel is explicitly and unabashedly a love story and love was what Howard most wanted to talk about when we met.            “The minute you fall deeply in love … melancholy strolls into the garden”. For Lily and Sam love strikes with a thunderclap. Lily is in love at … Continue reading →

Was George Harrison really the “Economy Beatle”? Philip Norman wrote Shout!, the first grown-up biography of The Beatles, shortly before John Lennon was murdered. People told him he was crazy, that The Fabs were yesterday's news, that everybody already knew everything there was to know about the band. He wasn't crazy. Fifty-three years after they broke up The Beatles are still an industry, or as Philip puts it, practically a religion. Even today there is passionate disagreement about George Harrison. There are those who point to the triumphant first solo album, All Things Must Pass, as proof that he was always Lennon and McCartney's equal and was unfairly sidelined in … Continue reading →

A goldmine of nutters, obsessives, murderers, vicars and, above all, readers! In a time before the internet, the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary was the Wickipedia of its day, crowdsourcing its contributions from thousands of readers across the world. Over decades, millions of slips inscribed with words and quotations poured into a metal shed in an Oxford garden to be assembled into the magnificent, comprehensive, authoritative dictionary that was a wonder of the age. It is understandable that attention has tended to focus on the principle Editor, James Murray, who devoted thirty-six years to the project (he got it to the letter T), but a chance discovery sent Sarah … Continue reading →

Don't knock it 'till you've tried it!

Have you never forgotten someone you've slept with? Neil Jordan is best known as an internationally famous film director, of course – The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, Interview With The Vampire and many others. But he is also an accomplished novelist. The Well Of St Nobody is a story of legend, of music and eroticism, of consequences and of identity. “The girl who had walked her mother through those dry stone walls decorated with crutches was not the girl who had lost her virginity on the living-room floor of Tonglee Road; was not the girl who rattled out her Bach fugues in front of the Rachmaninov virtuoso…” The virtuoso is … Continue reading →

Margaret Thatcher and Goth Culture It was the Age of Thatcher, and beyond the playgrounds of the red-braces wide boys and the Sloane Square privileged, it was grim. Unemployment was a weapon in the class war. The Yorkshire Ripper ran riot. Bitter industrial disputes divided communities, while the police was brutally remade into a national instrument to break the miners. And maybe you remember the pop music of the time: Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Madonna, Michael Jackson. Wham! But there was a more intense musical response to the wretchedness of the times, more intense and more appropriate. Punk had come to a sticky end, but it inspired a new generation … Continue reading →

Lawrence Krauss – Head Of Zeus – £20.00 Professor Lawrence Krauss has made major contributions to the field of theoretical physics and is one of the world's great scientific communicators with a gift for illuminating complex ideas. His new book, The Known Unknowns makes a tour d'horizon of the frontiers of current knowledge, touching on such questions as: Is infinity real? Does the multiverse actually exist? Is quantum mechanics true? Can we create consciousness? And lots more. It is an exhilarating read, and as he writes, “Focusing on the edge of knowledge provides an opportunity to explain how far we have come…” He is also, incidentally, a dazzling close-up magician … Continue reading →

Barry Forshaw – Oldcastle Books – £12.99 Is there any man or woman in England who knows more about crime writing than Barry Forshaw? Here at The Books Podcast he is our go-to man. He is also delightful company. Simenon's Maigret books are the most successful non-anglophone crime series in the world. Easily up there with Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe, but with an entirely different approach to detection. Maigret is closer to psychologist or priest than sleuth. But Simenon regarded his romans dur – hard novels – as his real writing, and Andre Gide said he was the greatest French novelist of his time. Having fairly recently come to … Continue reading →

Joanne Harris – Broken Light – Orion £20.00 If every piece about Joanne Harris starts by reminding us that she is the author of Chocolat, she can live with that. It might be close to a quarter of a century ago, but it was a dazzling success and made her a household name, while the film adaptation took her to the Oscars, where Alfred Molina made sure that she was included in all the invitations. Every one of her novels since Chocolat has been a best-seller, and it is safe to assume that Broken Light will also be a big hit. A seven year old girl is taken to a … Continue reading →

Steve Richards – Atlantic Books – £10.99 Steve Richards' last book was an entertaining and penetrating discussion of the last ten Prime Ministers (or at any rate, the last ten at the time of publication – we've had a couple more since then.) But as he writes in his new book, “Most routes to Number 10 are blocked.” But some of the nearly men and women are bigger and more substantial figures than the ones who made it to the top. Why did John Major become Prime Minister when Michael Heseltine did not? Why did Michael Foot lead the Labour party instead of political heavyweights like Denis Healey and Roy … Continue reading →

Joel Meadows     Heavy Metal Entertainment               £35.99 Tripwire is thirty, and we were intrigued when this beautiful anniversary book arrived at The Books Podcast. What is Tripwire, you ask? It's a… well, it's a magazine. Hm… funny name for a magazine. What sort of magazine? A slightly geeky magazine. Geeky? OK, it's a magazine for anybody who shares the interests of editor in chief, Joel Meadows, but there again, Joel's interests are mainstream geek, so that's alright. And one of his interests is illustrative art, principally comic-book and movie art, and Tripwire is in love with it. And that endears it to me. We visited Joel Meadows to discuss the past … Continue reading →

David Hepworth – Bantam Press – £25 The world has many holy places – Mecca, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the Golden Temple at Amritsar, the Wetherspoons on King St in Hammersmith – but for some of us these are all trumped by Number 3 Abbey Rd in St John's Wood. EMI's Abbey Road recording studios. Even today musicians and bands – good bands – are sometimes intimidated by the sheer history of the place. To stand where the Beatles stood and sing where the Beatles sang is to feel the shadow of genius. And you might also rate Elgar, Noel Coward and Jacqueline du Pre. Not to mention Bernard … Continue reading →

Louise Willder – OneWorld – £14.99 Quick review of Louise's checklist of adjectives not to be used in a blurb: breathtaking, spellbinding, dazzling, powerful, beautiful. So I can't say it's any of those. Readable? Well, as she points out, it's a book. Darkly comic. That just means unpleasant, doesn't it? I also can't accuse it of ‘mordant wit'. Although it is funny. Very. ‘Rich tapestry'. She's got a point there – I don't know what that means. ‘Reminds one of Martin Amis.' Yes,  I think we can definitely shelve that one! Oh – I know. I can crib her quote from Charlie Brooker: “The potential all-time #1 bestseller”. Will that … Continue reading →

Nick Wallis – Bath Publishing – £25 It is the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Hundreds of innocent people prosecuted, ruined, often imprisoned – their lives destroyed. And hundreds more dismissed from their jobs and their livelihoods, obliged to pay thousands and even tens of thousands of pounds “back” that they never stole in the first place. And all of this visited upon their staff by the Post Office – an institution since 1660, and one of the most trusted brands in British life. You were probably aware of the scandal as it emerged into the public arena, and you were probably shocked. But the picture is … Continue reading →

Rachel Gross – W W Norton – £19.99 There comes a time in every woman's life when her body bumps up against the limits of human knowledge. In that moment, she sees herself as medicine has seen her: a mystery. An enigma. A black box that, for some reason, no-one has managed to get inside.” This was the experience of Rachel Gross, who found that the standard treatment for her own (very common) condition was practically medieval. As a science journalist her response was to research the present state of knowledge, and investigate in detail the biology and background of the female reproductive system. Vagina Obscura explores the structures, purposes … Continue reading →

Howard Jacobson – Jonathan Cape – £18.99 It is striking that one of our finest novelists didn't publish his first novel until he was nearly forty, and characteristically, he was ticking off literature's late starters as he passed them by. Reading Howard Jacobson, you would say that he was born to be a writer, and he would have concurred. Mother's Boy is the account of the road to his realisation, taking in his childhood, his education, his wives and his travels. Wolverhampton does not come out of it well. If we observe that Mother's Boy reads like one of Howard Jacobson's novels that is only to its advantage. But this … Continue reading →

Simon Mason – Riverrun – £14.99 A beautiful girl is strangled in the Provost's lodge in an Oxford College while the college is shmoozing a billionaire Emirati. It is a situation which calls for delicate handling, so it is perhaps a shame that new DI Wilkins is sent by mistake to take charge of the investigation. A town and gown setting. An odd couple detective partnership. A gratifying cast of suspects. And more twists and turnings than you could shake a Porter's Lodge at. Simon Mason has kicked off his new police procedural series with a swagger. A Killing In November is his first crime novel, having previously written adult … Continue reading →

Dr Thomas Halliday – Allen Lane – £20 Otherlands is a kind of travel book, traveling in time and across the globe, pushing back through the last half-billion years, showing you ever stranger beasts and more and more unfamiliar landscapes. Each chapter takes us to a location in the world that exemplifies a nexus of evolutionary change. Odd details capture your imagination and answer questions you never knew you had: In the Jurassic period, in the absence of wood-boring predators, logs lasted rather longer than they do now; Who knew? You wouldn't have seen flowers until the Cretaceous either, a mere 145 million years ago, not to mention a world … Continue reading →

Robert J Lloyd – Melville House Press – £18.99 In 1678 London was rebuilding after the Great Fire of London, just twelve years earlier. Among the great men undertaking this enterprise was Robert Hooke, who is a central character in Rob Lloyd's The Bloodless Boy. A scientist and energetically modern visionary: “Some parts of Nature are too large to be comprehended, some too little to be perceived. Our most solid definitions are imperfect, only expressions of our misguided apprehensions, not the true nature of things themselves.” Hooke was a man of boundless curiosity. But in this novel Hooke finds himself reluctantly drawn into a perplexing murder mystery, with his friend … Continue reading →

Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou – Picador – £25 “Once upon a time, in the book of Genesis, humans were made in the visual image and likeness of God. It was a social, as well as a corporeal correspondence, celebrating both the fleshly wonders of the human body and the personable presence of the deity.” So says Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou. She has written a fascinating volume, scholarly and hugely entertaining, exploring the ancient conception of the god of the bible, focussing on his corporeality and presence in his followers' lives. Professor Stavrakopoulou is, herself, also entertaining and engaging and we have a high old time discussing her book, which illuminates our understanding … Continue reading →

Nicholas Wapshott – W. w. Norton – £22.95 Not many academic economists are household names. But when I was young, Milton Friedman was. The high-priest of Monetarism and intellectual descendant of Friedrich Hayek, his theories were much admired by right-wing politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Meanwhile Paul Samuelson made his mark with his bestselling economics textbook which was the standard text for decades. I used it myself at school. Nicholas Wapshott has a brilliant eye for the narrative that unlocks the subject for the general reader. In the case of Samuelson and Friedman, Wapshott's springboard is the column in Newsweek magazine that the two economists shared, or … Continue reading →

Robb Johnson – PM Books – £17.99

Alwyn Turner – Profile Books – £20

Adrian MacKinder – Pen & Sword White Owl    £19.99        $29.99 Face Front, True Believers! This is the story of the man who gave the world the Marvel Universe, who bestrode the comic-book industry like a colossus, and who said “Face Front, True Believers!” a lot.In later life Stan Lee became nearly as famous as his creations, appearing in cameo in a score of the films based on the characters he had created. But for nearly twenty years he laboured in an unprepossessing corner of popular culture, writing comic-books for kids. It was only with the Marvel revolution that comics exploded into the main stream. Spider-man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible … Continue reading →

Paul Theroux – Hamish Hamilton – £20.95 Long before he was the father of Louis Theroux, Paul Theroux was a distinguished and prolific travel writer and novelist. Born in 1941 (and we are delighted to note he is still with us), it is well-known that he joined the Peace Corps in 1963 and was declared persona non grata in Malawi by the dictator Hastings Banda for assisting in the escape of his political opponent. Paul Theroux's first big success as a writer was the classic The Great Railway Bazaar in 1972, and he is also the author of Mosquito Coast, and Riding The Iron Rooster. In 1990 Tim met him … Continue reading →

Philip Norman – Weidenfeld and Nicolson – £20 It is generally accepted that Jimi Hendrix is the most important guitarist in the history of rock music. In just four years he revolutionised everybody’s idea of what an electric guitar was capable of, set new standards for showmanship, and left a dazzling catalogue of recordings. Poster boy for the 27 Club (rock musicians who died at that age), Hendrix died in London fifty years ago. That anniversary prompted Philip Norman to add to his wonderful series of biographies of the greats. We joined Philip in his garden to talk about what Jimi Hendrix still means to us.

Larry Watson – Algonquin Books  £21.99   $27.95 The Lives of Edie Pritchard is Larry Watson’s eleventh novel, and he is at the height of his powers. It is a big novel set in Larry’s back yard of the states where the Midwest becomes the West. We follow the heroine Edie through three points in her life from a young married woman through to her early old age and grandmotherhood, as she learns that she cannot escape from being the person that others need her to be. “When you’re back home you never have a chance to be someone other than who you were then. Even if you never were that … Continue reading →

Liz Williams – Reaktion Books – £15.95 In her discussion of Stonehenge, Liz Williams writes: “There is a legend that Merlin simply flew the entire circle from Ireland, which I think we can rule out.” This is typical of her approach. She is not embarrassed by the unprovable, but has a robust attitude to the wilder flights of fancy. Thus, she makes judicious assessments of, for instance, claims that present magic accesses ancient knowledge (weak), and considers what we can actually know about druidic practices (not much for sure), but she does find the roots and traces of pre-christian spirituality in a culture which didn’t take notes. We are on … Continue reading →

Liz Williams – Reaktion Books – £15.95 In her discussion of Stonehenge, Liz Williams writes: “There is a legend that Merlin simply flew the entire circle from Ireland, which I think we can rule out.” This is typical of her approach. She is not embarrassed by the unprovable, but has a robust attitude to the wilder flights of fancy. Thus, she makes judicious assessments of, for instance, claims that present magic accesses ancient knowledge (weak), and considers what we can actually know about druidic practices (not much for sure), but she does find the roots and traces of pre-christian spirituality in a culture which didn’t take notes. We are on … Continue reading →

Chris Kirkham – Wallace Publishing – £8.99

Chris Kirkham – Wallace Publishing – £8.99

Stephen Tow – Rowman and Littlefield £15.99 To have been young in London in the 1960’s must have been very heaven. At least if you had a yen to see live music in clubs and pubs and a dilapidated hotel on an island in the River Thames. The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Cream, Pink Floyd… (stop me when it gets dizzying). The city was a musical crucible, taking American jazz and blues, English folk and whimsy, and a host of European influences, and transmuting them into the spun gold of classic rock, with a little help from art colleges and a couple of fellows named Marshall. … Continue reading →

Stephen Tow – Rowman and Littlefield £15.99 To have been young in London in the 1960’s must have been very heaven. At least if you had a yen to see live music in clubs and pubs and a dilapidated hotel on an island in the River Thames. The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Cream, Pink Floyd… (stop me when it gets dizzying). The city was a musical crucible, taking American jazz and blues, English folk and whimsy, and a host of European influences, and transmuting them into the spun gold of classic rock, with a little help from art colleges and a couple of fellows named Marshall. … Continue reading →

Well-behaved women don’t make history, and we need to be a bit grown up about our approach to feminism. That is the starting point of the new book from Helen Lewis. Lewis is a trenchant and thoughtful journalist, and also an amusing and witty contributor to satirical BBC shows. Happily both these sides of her outlook are on display in this entertaining book. By focussing on eleven of the struggles that have got us this far in the quest for an equal society – Divorce, Education, Abortion, Safety and so on – she discusses the history, the current issues, the state of play and the women who got us here … Continue reading →

Well-behaved women don’t make history, and we need to be a bit grown up about our approach to feminism. That is the starting point of the new book from Helen Lewis. Lewis is a trenchant and thoughtful journalist, and also an amusing and witty contributor to satirical BBC shows. Happily both these sides of her outlook are on display in this entertaining book. By focussing on eleven of the struggles that have got us this far in the quest for an equal society – Divorce, Education, Abortion, Safety and so on – she discusses the history, the current issues, the state of play and the women who got us here … Continue reading →

Barry Forshaw – Oldcastle Books    £12.99 Barry Forshaw is one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction. Writer, commentator, editor, broadcaster and enthusiast, his fingerprints are everywhere. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried, it is he. Why is crime fiction the most popular of all genres? It’s a mystery, an enigma, a puzzle. And every puzzle has a solution. Tim Haigh pounded the mean streets and leant on his informers, he sifted the evidence and demolished the alibis, he kissed the femme fatale and sent the samples to the forensic lab to be… forensicced, and eventually he felt Barry’s collar, hauling him down the nick for a … Continue reading →

Barry Forshaw – Oldcastle Books    £12.99 Barry Forshaw is one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction. Writer, commentator, editor, broadcaster and enthusiast, his fingerprints are everywhere. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried, it is he. Why is crime fiction the most popular of all genres? It’s a mystery, an enigma, a puzzle. And every puzzle has a solution. Tim Haigh pounded the mean streets and leant on his informers, he sifted the evidence and demolished the alibis, he kissed the femme fatale and sent the samples to the forensic lab to be… forensicced, and eventually he felt Barry’s collar, hauling him down the nick for a … Continue reading →

Steve Richards – Atlantic Books £20 You have to wonder why the office of Prime Minister is so coveted. While many politicians aspire to Number Ten, more or less all the Prime Ministers in this book spent at least some of their time in office in political Hell. And yet they typically cling on to office like grim death, and in some cases never get over its loss. Steve Richards, the most thoughtful and incisive of journalists and commentators, has written a detailed and hugely entertaining study of the nine Prime Ministers of the modern era, from Harold Wilson to Theresa May. Packed with anecdote and analysis, and unashamedly fascinated … Continue reading →