After a tumultuous European Championship, a landslide electoral victory for Labour and schizophrenic weather, you might feel like getting away from it all. Well, there’s no better way to do this than burying yourself in a good book. That’s why we’ve asked CapX contributors and editors for their book recommendations for lazy summer days.
Marc Sidwell
Top of my to-be-read pile is ‘The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised’ by James Pethoukoukis. If the Conservative Party is to have a future, it needs to get in touch with the sort of ‘Up Wing’ ambition and optimism Pethoukoukis sets out.
I also want to dig into ‘The Individualists’ by Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi. This intellectual history of libertarian thought promises to be a refreshing antidote to a world of ideas oversupplied with ‘postliberal’ perspectives.
To remind me why these ideas of freedom and innovation matter, I’ll turn to ‘The Spectre of State Capitalism’ by Ilias Alami and Adam Dixon. Not exactly a light beach read, but an invaluable guide to the new corporatist politics emerging around the world. With Labour setting up Great British Energy and the National Wealth Fund, it couldn’t be more topical. And the book is available as a free pdf if you don’t want to drop £90 for the hard copy.
However, I have a new baby, so these reading plans are more aspirations than hard targets. Screaming fits through the night permitting (and any problems the baby may have sleeping as well), I will be flipping through ‘Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting’ by Joshua Gans, to discover how incentive structures and a grasp of the benefits of outsourcing can help with nap – and nappy – management. And failing that, I will have to fall back on a sixteenth re-read of ‘The House at Pooh Corner’.
Joseph Dinnage
‘Death and the Penguin’ by Andrey Kurkov is probably the best book I’ve read this year. Set in Ukraine, it chronicles the exploits of an obituary writer and his pet penguin, Misha. It’s incredibly funny, at times tragic and provides a fascinating insight into the imperilled European state.
I also read Voltaire’s ‘Zadig’. If you’re ever feeling down on your luck, fret not, you could be Zadig. Despite his good manners, intelligence and wit, Zadig is constantly bombarded by stupidity, violence and betrayal in his travels across ancient Babylonia. It’s short, funny and guaranteed to lift your spirits. A perfect book for the discerning beach-goer.
At the top of my want-to-read list is Ian Acheson’s latest book ‘Screwed’, about how our prison crisis came to be and how to fix it. Respect for the rule of law is central to a functional liberal society. Right now, our commitment to that principle seems shaky, and improving our crumbling, overcrowded prisons is vital to changing this.
Alys Denby
I was working as a parliamentary researcher in 2017 and didn’t think I’d enjoy reliving that agonising era of ‘meaningful votes’ and ‘Malthouse compromises’, but Tim Shipman’s ‘No Way Out’ makes it fun. It’s also a useful reminder of Keir Starmer’s role in prolonging the pain as shadow Brexit Secretary.
Paul Murray’s ‘The Mark and the Void’ is a very funny novel set during the 2008 crash. As one character Jurgen, a German financier who plays in a reggae band called Gerhard and the Mergers, puts it: ‘Certainly it is time bankers were recognised by the art world. Given that we buy most of the actual art, it is frustrating to be continually misrepresented by it’.
Harry Phibbs
‘I’ll obviously be flattered if you read it. But the most important thing is that you buy it’, Tim Shipman declared at the launch of his latest tome, ‘No Way Out: Brexit: From the Backstop to Boris’. It comes in at 736 pages and so would be quite heavy to lug down to the beach. But I found it absorbing reading. This journalist has an unsurpassed capacity to persuade politicians to tell him what was going on behind the scenes. Shipman is not so pompous as to make any grand claims to posterity but he doubtless felt some obligation to future generations to get a full account of this period recorded – and by doing so has made a rather more significant contribution than some academic historians. Though he is not a patsy of any faction, nothing in his account dissuaded me from concluding that Theresa May’s premiership was when the Conservatives lost their way, the recovery under Boris Johnson merely a false dawn.
Jonn Elledge
I have just finished Josephine Quinn’s How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History – an absolutely magisterial work which starts in the Bronze Age and ends with the discovery of the new world. Quinn’s thesis is that Victorian “civilisational thinking”, the idea the world can be broken into separate silos, is misleading: societies have always been defined as much by their connections through trade and war as by division, and that “western civilisation” as roots not just in Greece and Rome but in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and the Islamic caliphates. It’s brilliant.
Elsewhere, I’ve just run out of Mick Heron’s Slow Horses books, which are somehow even better and more compelling than the TV adaptation of them, so that’s annoying.
The must-have beach read of the summer, though, is my own book, A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines On Our Maps, which tells the stories of several dozen lines on maps, from the unification of Ancient Egypt to the very modern debate about where space begins. The TLS described me as “genuinely funny”, so there.
Tim Worstall
My two most recent favourites are Denis Mack Smith and Christopher Hibbert, both on Mussolini. I’ve been eyeing up certain sets of economic proposals in our own day – that vitalness of government direction of economic effort, that insistence on mission-oriented national planning with strict conditionality – and trying to recall where this has all been seen before. And, well, yes, this is most akin to the economics of fascism. That corporatism where the ignorant and self-aggrandising insist upon what everyone else must do to the impoverishment of the nation. Not fascism itself you understand – there are no spiffy uniforms this time around – but the economics of fascism.
The enjoyment was in finding that I had recalled all of this correctly. This is just how Benito impoverished Italy. Quite why anyone wants to do it again I’m not sure but there we are. It has indeed been fun checking that it didn’t work last time either.
Karl Williams
Now the dust has settled on the Conservative Party’s catastrophic general election defeat, it is time to think about rebuilding. And what better way to begin this vital endeavour than by going back to the foundations of modern conservatism and surveying the ground afresh?
That is why my recommendation for summer reading to friends and colleagues in Westminster is ‘Conservative Revolution’, a collection of essays edited by (ahem) Karl Williams and Robert Colvile. It was published earlier this year (before the general election was called) in part to mark the 50th anniversary of the Centre for Policy Studies – which, in the words of Margaret Thatcher, ‘was where our Conservative Revolution began’.
However, the 16 essays in the collection are concerned not just with what happened in the summer of 1974, but also attempt to answer the question: what might a similar revolution look like today? Contributors span CPS veterans, distinguished historians and some of the most perceptive thinkers on contemporary politics and policy: Charles Moore, Dominic Sandbrook, Charlotte Howell, Anthony Seldon, Tim Congdon, Ryan Bourne, Niall Ferguson, Paul Goodman, David Willetts, Tim Knox, Stephen Parkinson, Graham Brady, Maurice Saatchi, Rachel Wolf and Alys Denby – and of course Margaret Thatcher herself.
Whether you’re relaxing on the beach, looking to pass the time productively waiting in the airport, or simply enjoying a nice staycation lounging around in your garden, you could do far worse than dip in and out of these entertaining, informative and thought-provoking essays on conservatism past, present and future.
William Atkinson
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