It’s been a wild summer already. Britain’s onto its seventh prime minister in a decade, with Andy Burnham wasting no time rearranging the furniture – and, for part of the week, the postcode – of No 10. Outside Westminster, England gave us their best World Cup run in 60 years, though the trophy itself will have to wait. What better way to see out the season than with a good book? We asked CapX’s editors and contributors what they’re packing for the holidays.
Below you’ll find contributions from Liam Halligan, Daniel Hannan, Karl Williams, Gawain Towler and more.
Andy Burnham’s choice of Chancellor means that ‘Go Big’ by Ed Miliband can, fortunately, go back on the shelf. A very high shelf. In its place, I’ll be reading ‘The Impossible Bomb’, by Gareth Williams, about the British scientists who made the Manhattan Project possible, but were written out of history by the Americans – and Britain’s own Christopher Nolan. I’m also looking forward to Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new-ish book on the crash of 1929, having devoured his history of the 2008 crisis. And unusually for me, I plan to do some re-reading – of Ian Leslie’s ‘John & Paul’, which has been haunting my imagination ever since I finished it last year.
Given that I’ve been appointed Director of the Centre for Policy Studies from mid-September, this is essential reading. Businessman turned political strategist John Hoskyns joined the CPS during its early days – back in the mid-1970s. ‘Just in Time’ is a no-holds-barred account of how a think tank’s ideas can successfully transform an entire nation’s political economy, with huge national and international implications. Hoskyns helped turn the CPS into the intellectual powerhouse that engineered Thatcherism – and rescued Britain from the torpor of the late-1970s. The book is full of drama, human endeavour – and lessons for today.
Stoner is a novel released to little acclaim which, through word of mouth, became an unlikely modern classic. Spanning the first half of twentieth century America, it tells the story of William Stoner, an unassuming academic at an unremarkable mid-Western university – elevating an ordinary, relatively humdrum life story into a profound and universal reflection on human existence. Featuring masterly prose, genuine emotional depth and an almost shattering examination of dignity in the face of failure, this relatively slim volume is one of the most powerful novels I’ve ever read.
Anthony Lane has for many years written film reviews for The New Yorker – and is one of the world’s most influential and respected film critics. He is also the husband of my friend, fellow Telegraph columnist and Planet Normal Co-Host Allison Pearson – so I’m lucky to know him personally.
‘Nobody’s Perfect’ brings together some of Lane’s reviews from his first decade with The New Yorker, beginning in 1993 – and, as a collection, genuinely defines the standard for modern film and cultural criticism. His writing combines formidable literary erudition (he’s a Cambridge English grad and leading authority on T.S. Eliot) with sharp, accessible wit.
I love film and always learn a huge amount from each of Lane’s reviews – which bridge high and low culture, treating popcorn blockbusters and fine art with equal critical seriousness and, where warranted, disdain.
From ‘Indecent Proposal’ to ‘Remains of the Day’, from ‘Pulp Fiction’ to the Russian Stalin-era classic ‘Burnt by the Sun’, Lane nails it every time – and this brilliant volume contains plenty of penetrating book reviews and profiles too, including Julia Roberts and Alfred Hitchcock. A superb addition to any bookshelf – and a perfect companion for those who like lazy, film-watching sunny afternoons.
I can’t recommend ‘Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found’ by Andrew Graham-Dixon enough. It will transform how you look at Vermeer’s paintings, but it’s much more than that – a portrait of a country traumatised by war and sectarian violence building a peaceful, innovative alternative, with the help of pioneering ideas about religious and personal freedom. This August, I’m looking forward to briefly shaking off politics while I read ‘Taylor’s Version’ by Stephanie Burt, on the poetic genius of Taylor Swift, then getting energised for the autumn with Cate Hall’s high-agency manifesto, ‘You Can Just Do Things’.
If you need more reading inspiration, you can listen to my recent interviews for The Capitalist with Adrian Wooldridge, Steve Davies, Matthew Elliott, Jeremy Hunt and Zoe Strimpel on their brilliant new books. Or for a glimpse of the sci-fi future rushing towards us, turn to the CapX archive – where you can read a taster of Rainer Zitelman’s ‘New Space Capitalism’. And while you’re there, don’t miss ‘The Gaslight War’, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (author of ‘Children of Time’), an unsettling short story about a robot war that isn’t quite what the news footage claims.
I will be reading Rachel Ferguson and Marcus Witcher’s new book, ‘Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak and the Promise of America’ this summer, to learn about the power and importance of civil society. Mutual aid societies and churches have played an important role in much of history, and it will be interesting to learn how they have helped historically oppressed groups, specifically in the American context.
I’ve recently finished ‘Mr China’ by Tim Clissold, set in a time when the West looked to invest in developing China, chasing the fortune of the century. It takes place just as Deng’s liberalisation set off China’s industrial boom, when a Wall Street banker and his team aimed to become the next J.P. Morgan – buying up Chinese factories along the way. It’s almost hard to imagine how far behind China was back then, when the two biggest economies of today weren’t even seen in the same universe. The rules were written differently for Westerners, and watching more than $400 million ride on that is almost stressful to read – but it’s told with a real sense of humour. You start to realise how rapid China’s industrialisation was, from factories that could barely produce working parts to leading the world in EVs.
This summer I’m looking forward to reading ‘The War Below’ by Ernest Scheyder, a recommendation from my professor. It looks at the fight behind going green, following the battles over individual mines and whether sustainability is really the way forward for them. Lastly, as I graduate with my degree, ‘That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen’ by the economist Frédéric Bastiat feels will be a fitting send off. It’s a short piece from the 1850s, all coming down to one question, is breaking a window good or bad for the economy.
One of my final tasks before leaving the CPS at the end of August will be drafting the reading lists for the third cohort of Thatcher Fellows. These lists will focus on specific topics: examples from the last two years include ‘The New Right, Then and Now’, ‘Free Markets and the Conservative Party’, ‘Anarchy in the UK?’, ‘The Growth of the Regulatory State’ and ‘Political Journalism and the Lobby’.
However, in the meantime I’ve set the new Thatcher Fellows some background reading for the summer, including Duncan Weldon’s ‘Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through’ (a superb canter through modern British economic history), F.A. Hayek’s ‘Individualism and Economic Order’ (containing some of Hayek’s key essays on knowledge and the market economy) and Andrew Gamble’s ‘The Free Economy and the Strong State’ (the definitive analytical account of the Thatcherite project, written from an avowedly Gramscian-Marxist perspective).
For myself, I am looking forward to reading ‘King of the World’, Philip Mansel’s mammoth biography of France’s Louis XIV. I’ve often felt I was born in the wrong era and so have missed my true calling as a Williamite polemicist in 1690s England, but at a time when Labour seems intent on dragging Britain back into the EU’s regulatory orbit, it is worth recalling to mind the twin, sempiternal perils of universal monarchy and French perfidy.
On a lighter note, I recently enjoyed reading Harry Turtledove’s alternative history novel, ‘How Few Remain’, about a world in which the Confederate States of America won the Civil War and achieved independence in 1862. Set in the 1880s, the book is the story of the fictional Second Mexican War, told through the eyes of historical figures whose fortunes have turned out rather differently in this timeline, including ex-president and Marxist agitator Abraham Lincoln, San Francisco newspaper editor Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass, Confederate General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Prussian military attaché Alfred von Schlieffen (of Schlieffen Plan fame) and Union cavalry commanders Theodore Roosevelt and George Armstrong Custer. I am looking forward to reading the sequel, which begins in 1914…
A beautifully written biography of Britain’s longest-serving foreign secretary which, in telling his story, presents as powerful and convincing an account as you will find of why the First World War happened and why the UK was dragged into it.
A young Oxford classicist taught in a Malawian school established to ensure that the elite of that country would get a firm grounding in Latin and Greek. He tells Malawi’s story in exquisite prose and, in doing so, gently demolishes the assumptions on which modern anti-colonialism rests.
Every parent ought to read this. And if you have teenage kids, try to get them off their phones for long enough to read it, too.
A familiar-seeming culture war sundered England between 1690 and 1714. Everything became about party loyalties. The period is generally neglected by all except specialist historians, but here is a book for the general reader, full of such colourful details that you keep having to remind yourself it is not a novel.
I wish I could pretend my summer reading is full of self-improving, heavyweight literature: the sort of humblebrag list that makes its author look good and leaves everyone else faintly in awe. But, truth be told, I spend the rest of the year reading serious and often turgid public policy stuff and so my plane and poolside selections are the lightest, slightest souffle you can imagine. That means anything by P.G. Wodehouse, Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward or Stephen Fry (but only one per holiday, there’s only so much elegantly-mannered social wit I can take). Then a piece of escapist science-fiction to distract me from the real world’s plodding problems – my current favourite is Vernor Vinge’s ‘A Deepness in the Sky’ – and finally something more earth-bound but equally speculative, which this year means William Gibson’s ‘The Peripheral’ (currently being turned into a TV series for Amazon if you’re interested) after I enjoyed his ‘Pattern Recognition’ a few years ago. But the ‘Odyssey’ in Plato’s original Greek is staying at home – I might watch the film on the plane instead.
My first choice is ‘Breakneck’ by Dan Wang. The basic argument is that China has become an ‘engineering state’, obsessed with building things, while America – and I would certainly include Britain – has become a lawyerly society, obsessed with finding reasons why things cannot be done.
Wang takes you through China’s factories, cities, infrastructure and extraordinary industrial expansion. He does not fall into the usual trap of either cheerleading for China or dismissing everything it has achieved because it is an authoritarian state. He is very clear about the appalling consequences when an engineering mentality is applied not just to roads and factories, but to human beings – from the one-child policy to zero-Covid. You do not need to want the Chinese system to accept that the West has lost much of its ability to act. Anyone interested in Britain’s growth problem should read it.
My second choice is ‘The Dispossessed’ by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is usually described as science fiction, but it is really a novel about political economy, freedom and the way institutions change over time.
The central character, Shevek, is a physicist from Anarres, a poor anarchist society without private property or a conventional government. He travels to the much richer neighbouring planet of Urras, hoping to find the intellectual freedom that he increasingly lacks at home. What follows is not a simple contest between virtuous socialism and wicked capitalism. Both societies have real strengths, and both have serious failures. Le Guin understands that abolishing formal hierarchies does not abolish power. Bureaucracy, conformity and vested interests reappear even in a society supposedly built to prevent them. Equally, wealth and technological progress do not automatically produce freedom or decency.
Right now, I’m reading ‘Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump’ by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, both of the New York Times. It’s a fun, pacy read about what surely must be the most dysfunctional administration in US history.
It’s easy to sit back, read and enjoy yourself, until you remember that these people are running what still qualifies as the single most powerful nation in human history. Then, it gets a little more unsettling.
Given that, I’m looking forward to reading ‘31 Inventions that Built Our World’, by Jonn Elledge – my predecessor writing the Nimby Watch column. It’s out late in August, but as he’s been kind enough to send me an advance copy it’s next on my reading list. It opens with the idea of ‘inventing’ the city, which is certainly an interesting place to start…
Firstly, I’m planning to get Jonathan Healey’s ‘The Blood in Winter’, his account of the eighteen months in which the England of 1641 argued, petitioned and pamphleteered itself into civil war. Healey writes social history with a столяр’s feel for how ordinary people experienced high politics, and the book is essentially a study of what happens when a political nation stops trusting its own information, London awash with newsbooks, rumour and managed leaks. Clearly there are no parallels to today. For the founder of a society named after Lilburne it is close to a set text. Next up is George Owers’s ‘The Rage of Party’, which I bought when it came out last September, mislaid while moving and have just rediscovered. It is about the ferocious Whig-against-Tory politics between the Glorious Revolution and Queen Anne’s death. It is the origin story of party politics itself: rage, libel, purges and all. The comfort it offers is that the 1700s were filthier than anything Nigel Farage has yet been accused of. And finally ‘Steeple Chasing’ by Peter Ross, a corrective to all those who say I should write a book about my bimbling round the country looking at churches. As far as I have gotten into it, the book has been written far more beautifully than I could ever do.
The most recent book to stand out – and for once I was only months rather than years behind the curve – was ‘The Rage of Party’, George Owers’s brilliant, gripping and often laugh-out-loud funny account of the rise of Whigs and Tories. I’m increasingly persuaded it is that period in British history between the Glorious Revolution of 1688/89 and the death of Queen Anne in 1714 which shapes our modern state: Parliament and the Union, recognisable political parties, the beginnings of a limited constitutional monarchy, the first whispers of Cabinet government, a central bank, parliamentary rather than royal control over armies and navies. Owers corrals the sometimes-unfamiliar strands masterfully and is excellent on the sheer absurdity which occasionally wreathed it all.
Having recently been to Dublin for the James Joyce extravaganza of Bloomsday, and immersed myself in the history section of Hodges Figgis, top of my to-read pile is ‘An Accidental Villain’, Linden MacIntyre’s new study of Sir Hugh Tudor. Billed in the subtitle as ‘Churchill’s enforcer in revolutionary Ireland’, Tudor was a Royal Artillery officer who’d risen to divisional command by the end of the First World War. A close friend of Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, in 1920 he was appointed ‘Police Adviser’ to the British administration in Dublin Castle as the Irish War of Independence grew fiercer. He reinforced the Royal Irish Constabulary with the notorious ‘Black and Tans’ and the Auxiliary Division. Tudor believed in harsh measures to put down the insurgency, while claiming to care nothing for politics; in Ireland in the 1920s that was not an option. As the violence grew worse and less excusable, Tudor had lost the confidence of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and the Commander-in-Chief, Ireland, and was sidelined. Until now, an extra passing through the dramas of others, I’m looking forward to seeing him in a starring role – whether hero or villain.
One quick recommendation for those so minded: I recently re-read Sir Sidney Low’s concise 1928 work ‘The British Constitution: Its Growth and Character’. Every age thinks it is roiled by a unique crisis and it can do you good to look at an earlier period to find perspective. Low observed that ‘in England we often do a thing first and then discover that we have done it’; he navigates an excellent path through the constitution which can tell us a great deal about now.
I’ve taken advantage of the government turnover and the serene hour of pure monarchal control of our nation to retreat to the Lake District. As long-memoried readers will recall, this is my usual annual retreat to imbibe freshwater ale and read in a serene, English environment. I’ve been catching up on a few books that London’s chaos usually prevents me from finishing, or even beginning.
To start with, here is a classic of the genre and a must-read for any politician with a scratch of economic policy thinking. ‘Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not To Fight Inflation,’ by my colleague Eamonn Butler and the late Robert Schuettinger is an unparalleled history of political economy, detailing the failures of well-meaning policies intended to control prices and ease ‘cost of living’ crises across various periods. There is a great deal to be learned from this book, particularly regarding the fallacy that politicians know better than the market. As readers will know, believing this is like believing there is food at the end of the hook. I cannot recommend it enough.
Secondly, the excellent ‘The Power of Creative Destruction: Economic Upheaval and the Wealth of Nations’ offers a fantastic rebuke to capitalism’s naysayers. To humour you, the reader, I invite you to recall how much you use Kodak’s cameras, or MySpace’s platform, and how much better off you are with WhatsApp or the digital camera in your phone. Many people who previously dipped negatives into chemical trays may have become unemployed, and a great deal of capital may have been destroyed, but if we zoom out and look at our economy now, I would wager we are all better off. Having read this brilliant book, I recommend that our factions challenge the idea that poverty is as widespread as our opponents insist. Show a Victorian child an iPhone, a Bose speaker or a fresh pineapple, and I would contend we win.
Finally, and as is customary, a video game befitting our modern multimedia age: I greatly enjoyed ‘007: First Light’. It is a highly immersive third person shooter experience, following the trials of Barbara Broccoli’s IP character (James Bond) in achieving his Double-0 licence. It involves a fresh set of characters that is diverse but not woke, and a quantum computer as the antagonist/protagonist (see www.tyistrategy.co.uk for all your quantum needs…). In playing the game, I missed multiple hours of sleep, and didn’t regret a moment. It is an immensely replayable game that I highly recommend.
Another summer, another chance to sit on a beach and read Robert Harris novels – that passes me by in favour of politics…
I’m reading through JD Vance’s ‘Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith’. While I’d prefer him to have RETVRN’d (As I’m sure his supporters would spell it) through the Anglican route, it’s astonishing that a sitting Vice President would bare his soul while in office and, presumably, preparing a tilt at the top job. I know all candidates write books in advance of presidential runs, but this is unusually open, plaintive and thoughtful when it didn’t need to be.
I’m also going to enjoy Dr Daniel Pitt’s ‘The Conservative Party and the Constitution’ (which I won on Twitter by retweeting Dr P’s promotional message for it!). It’s perfectly timed given we have a new PM who seems intent on more devolution, a core plank of what Vernon Bogdanor would call the New Constitution.
And since I’ve moved back to the countryside, I’m going to read ‘This Land Is Our Land: How We Lost the Right to Roam and How to Take It Back’ by Ken Ilgunas. Britain is blessed with over 140,000 miles of the ‘King’s Highway’, innumerable public footpaths and walkways, especially in the Cotswolds. But in the United States, land access seems far more restricted. I want to learn about our Enclosure Acts and arguments about the right to roam, and why we came to a different place than our cousins on the issue. Readers who know more, please get in touch!
Imagine you are an author in the late 19th century. In 1895, you gain access to electric lighting, so you can write without needing candles; in 1897, you can write on a typewriter; and in 1898, you become one of the first people in human history to see a cinematograph. That is the story of the great age of liberalism, told in Norman Stone’s ‘Europe Transformed, 1878–1919’.
The success of that era, when high culture coincided with high productivity, was rooted in a system centred on the morally responsible individual that replaced the ancient regime of status and privilege. By instituting what Deirdre McCloskey calls ‘equality of permission’, it created a society in which ‘people of energy and competence could be allowed to rise to their proper level’.
If you want to get inspired by a classical liberal era of prosperity, which, as we know, wasn’t perfect, but compared to the world before it, represented staggering progress, this is the book to read.
Secondly, and strictly for those who aren’t looking for a beach read, ‘The London Consensus: Economic Principles for the 21st Century’ edited by Tim Besley, Irene Bucelli and Andrés Velasco.
London was at the heart of the 20th century’s great economic disputes: not only the economic calculation debate, but the arguments over method and monetary policy. Now it seems the consensus in economic science may be returning to where it belongs.
Published last year, by three economists at the top of their field, ‘The London Consensus’ aims to become a replacement for the Washington Consensus. At its core, it is a return to classical political economy, where institutions and the rules of the game matter. But the book’s statism is hard to ignore. Although I agree with its core idea of bringing political economy back, I find myself uncomfortable with many of its conclusions, especially Dani Rodrik’s chapter on productivism.
Nevertheless, this is a book that is going to play an important role in economic discourse, so it is a necessary read.
‘Battle of the Arctic: The Maritime Epic of World War Two’ by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore tells the story of what Winston Churchill called ‘The worst journey in the world’. It’s all about the Arctic Convoy which took vital supplies from the Allies to the Soviet Union to sustain them and keep them in the fight against Hitler.
Churchill’s quote is correct but doesn’t quite portray the horror of what the sailors, soldiers, and others went through. U-boats, the Luftwaffe, frostbite, icebergs, storms, whales, and polar bears were just some of the dangers faced by these brave men. Montefiore sets it all out in vivid detail while also shining a light on the wider context of the War and the actions of leaders, politicians, and spies.
If Andy Burnham’s obsession with chips and gravy, Everton and Oasis has become all too much, fear not – I’ve got three books for you to forget all about it. Start with one from the CPS’s very own John Hoskyns. According to my third-year university supervisor, his book, ‘Just in Time’, is the finest thing ever written on Westminster and its systems. If you think his wiring diagram is difficult to understand, good luck trying to understand today’s version!
Next, I’d read ‘Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future’. Peter Thiel has never been far from controversy in the 12 years since he wrote this book, but many in Westminster would do well to heed his advice.
Finally, with proper cricket seemingly set to replace so-called ‘Bazball’, I’ll be taking Lawrence Booth and Nick Hoult’s account of a ‘test cricket revolution’ to Noosa with me. It was fun while it lasted, but let’s get back to winning one in 17.
Friedrich Hayek has been accused of many things. His fans have eulogised him as the greatest 20th-century philosopher of classical liberalism, as a deep thinker who exposed the innate flaws in planned economies and who provided the intellectual foundation for the reform programmes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. His detractors have called him an […]
Sven Beckert, a Harvard professor, has written a very long history of capitalism. As its subtitle suggests, ‘Capitalism: A Global History’ covers all of the inhabited world and spans a millennium, starting with 12th-century merchants trading through the port city of Aden. The enterprise is of more than purely historical interest. As Beckert points out, […]
Our staff and contributors have rounded up some of their favourite works of the year, and whether you’re after a history of English poetry or a sleazy Frenchman’s account of a trip to Lanzarote, there’s something for everyone in CapX’s Books of 2025. Robert Colvile, CapX Editor-in-Chief Since we’ve all had enough of politics at […]
