School’s out, Parliament has risen, England’s Test team has already suffered more than one batting collapse. All of which means summer is here. What books are CapX’s editors and contributors packing for their holidays?
Robert Colvile
It could be a reaction to the Trump presidency, but I’m mildly obsessed with the Founding Fathers at the moment. Having read and loved Ron Chernow’s biography of Washington, I’m now midway through his book on Hamilton. It’s an extraordinary story of ambition, courage and statecraft – although I imagine there’ll be a bit less on fiscal policy in the musical.
Once that’s done, it will be on to another extraordinary American – Robert Moses, whose story is told in Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. I figured I should tackle that as a warm-up before attempting Caro’s multi-volume epic on LBJ, which is still looming down at me from the shelves.
Alex Massie
Adam Nicolson’s The Seabird’s Cry: The Lives and Loves of Puffins, Gannets and Other Ocean Voyagers was an unexpected delight. I began it with little knowledge of, or even interest in, seabirds and finished it fascinated by these remarkable creatures and filled with an equal measure of regret that so many of them – puffins, albatrosses, shearwaters – are in sharp decline. This is a book packed with mystery and magic. Nicolson loves these birds and by the end of his book you will too.
Summer also means cricket. Charlie Campbell’s Herding Cats takes the lessons of Mike Brearley’s classic The Art of Captaincy and applies them to amateur cricket. If a professional captain often requires, like Brearlely, the skills of a psychotherapist, his amateur counterpart is more of a social worker. Campbell writes with insight and humour and anyone who has ever tried to play the game, far less be responsible for a side, will recognise and appreciate the story he tells.
Relatedly, this year’s Wisden, edited for the sixth time by Lawrence Booth, is my favourite edition of the almanack yet. Not least because it includes an article by me. A career highlight and reason enough for all of you to buy it, frankly.
Marian L. Tupy
I have just finished reading John Kane-Berman’s Between Two Fires: Holding the Liberal Centre in South African Politics. The author, who presided over the renowned South African Institute of Race Relations between 1983 and 2014, reflects on his life’s work defending classical liberal ideas in a country where individualism, limited government and the rule of law, have been under attack for generations. Whether white or black, nationalists and socialists, have dominated South African politics, relegating into seemingly perpetual opposition principled and courageous classical liberals, like Kane-Berman who, in spite of being a tiny minority, keep the flame of liberty burning in South Africa.
Damian Collins’s Charmed Life: The Phenomenal World of Philip Sassoon is a beautifully written paean to the life 1888-1939 of an English aesthete and Minister for the Air Force, who was the MP for Collins’s own constituency of Hythe, Kent. Born to a fabulously wealthy Jewish family, Sassoon moved relatively easily within the British establishment, surrounding himself with friends like Edward VIII, Winston Churchill, Duff Cooper and Anthony Eden. In addition to being at the centre of the British cultural life (as Works Minister he redesigned the Trafalgar Square in London), Sassoon was private secretary to Field Marshal Alexander Haig during World War I and PPS to David Lloyd George.
I have started Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam and, as far as I can tell, it is a well-researched and well-argued book bemoaning Europe’s failure to deal with immigration from developing countries. I am looking forward to finishing the book and, hopefully, learning more about the origins of the existentialist angst that seems to be driving parts of the Western world off the proverbial cliff.
Douglas Carswell
Top of my reading list for the summer was A Colder War by Charles Cumming, recommended to me by a friend. A spy thriller, its a perfect holiday read – as good as Le Carre, but without his slightly obscure style. And I’m delighted to discover that Cumming has written plenty more novels.
I’ve also just read Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and am about to start Our Man in Havana. Publishing has become an oligarchy, full of group think, I wonder if any novelist with anything serious and original to say, like Greene, would get published today?
After spending 12 years in the House of Commons, surrounded by all those Widmerpool types, I felt it was time to read Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. I’m on the third book in the series.
Last year, Matt Ridley’s The Evolution of Everything introduced me to Lucretius, who I speed read immediately. This summer I intend to go back a re-read Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things slowly. Written more than 2,000 years ago, it is a quite extraordinary explanation of order as a self-emergent phenomenon.
Tim Worstall
An excellent summer read for those of an economic disposition is Terry Pratchett’s Making Money. Yes, yes, it’s a fantasy novel; golems and wizards and the like abound. It also has a better analysis of how and why money works than many a textbook and a much sounder grasp of the basic idea than modern monetary theory. There’s also a very neat explosion of the gold standard in there which is a nice rebuttal of one of those ideas to the right of us to complement that of those to the left.
As ever with Pratchett there are some excellent jokes along with absurdities held up for unsparing examination. That the only economist in the book is a redheaded near madman who is rarely let out of the basement and into polite society is not the reason I like it so much and no, Pratchett and I never did meet. Similarly, as ever, what we think is a joke turns out not to be one. The hydraulic computer being built in said basement to model the economy via water tanks and flows is not an invention at all, it is a direct copy of just such a thing in the 1940s, a creation which led to a post at the LSE for its inventor. Computing power only caught up with Moniac, as the machine was known, in the 1990s. At the risk of spoiling the plot, no, it isn’t true that if we can get the models exactly right then the world will run properly.
The real story about the Discworld series is that it started out as fantasy but morphed, over the years, into a tremendous set of satires of the real world. The Truth, for example, ranks up there with Scoop as a comedy of Fleet Street. On one level Making Money is simply a good comedy. But it shows a greater understanding of economics than that other comedy show on offer currently, the duo of Corbyn and McDonnell.
Lewis James Brown
My first recommendation is Double Star, an excellent 1956 novel from the doyen of libertarian science fiction, Robert Heinlein. The wider setting of the now-familiar story of an actor masquerading as an incapacitated political figure is an intergalactic constitutional monarchy. The book makes a strong case for the House of Orange as the guiding light for the future of effective governance.
The second is I Heard You Paint Houses, about Teamsters union member and mafia hitman Frank Sheeran, written by former Delaware deputy attorney general Charles Brandt. The USP is the headline claim that Sheeran was the man who murdered America’s best known missing person, union baron Jimmy Hoffa. The real reason to read this now is to get ahead of the forthcoming Martin Scorsese Netflix adaptation – set to star Al Pacino, Robert de Niro and a coaxed-out-of-retirement Joe Pesci, the first time all three have appeared in the same film.
I have just ordered Cambridge academic Dr Finbarr Livesey’s From Global To Local: The making of things and the end of globalisation. The title says more than enough about why this is a 2017 must-read. Among the questions Livesey attempts to answer is “If robots can make everything, why would companies use Chinese workers?” As a global trade zealot, I’m intrigued as to whether Dr Livesey is sanguine or pessimistic about this coming repatriation.
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet
New, non-fiction: Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’s Shattered on the Hillary Clinton failed presidential campaign, with a lot of juicy gossip from that car crash. It’s all about internal feuds and clashing egos, not to mention a complete misreading of the American mood towards its elites.
Old, fiction: Alan Judd’s 1981 A Breed of Heroes on his Cold War hero Charles Thoroughgood’s early days as a junior officer in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. It’s close to the bone, obviously drawn from experience, and reminds me of Evelyn Waugh’s Guy Crouchback in the Sword of Honour trilogy.
Old, history: G. Lenotre’s pre-World War One La Révolution par ceux qui l’ont vue and Sous le bonnet rouge, published as an omnibus by Grasset as La Révolution française: a series of short historical essays and portraits by an unjustly forgotten historian. Lenotre specialised in anecdotal accounts but worked only with primary sources, often private archives, less than a century after the end of the French Revolution, his favourite period. He was respected by Richard Cobb for his impeccable, obsessive research and capacity to illuminate the minds and motivations of unknown revolutionary characters, replacing them in their own time. Lenotre also writes in delightful, pellucid French, which gives his accounts a Turgenev-like immediacy. He was immensely read in the late 19th and early 20th century in France and most of his books, never re-reviewed, are still in print.
Recent(-ish): Fouad Ajami’s 1999 The Dream Palace of the Arabs covers 70 years of Arab intellectual history, and the decline of intellectual activity in capitals like Cairo and Beirut. Ajami, who died a couple of years ago of a heart attack aged 68, held the chair of Middle-Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins. He was of Shia Lebanese origin and he writes profoundly in an extremely elegant English style that gives you the impression of experiencing the thought processes of the Arabic mind.
Old, historical fiction: Mary Renault’s Athenian trilogy: The Last of the Wine, The Mask of Apollo and The Praise Singer: a regular re-read, on the Pelopponesian war, the Dion dictatorship of Syracuse and the poet of the Thermopylae. When you put them down you can believe that you understand every word of Plato’s dialogues.
Old-ish autobiographical fiction: Gregor von Rezzori’s 1969 Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, a superb portrait of the collapse of Mitteleuropa in five set pieces. And, as a companion piece, Baroness R. G. Waldeck’s factual, superb Athene Palace on the arrival of the Nazis in Bucharest on 1940.
Then there are the perennial summer friends: Wodehouse, Dumas, Georgette Heyer, Marcel Pagnol, and Rod Heikell’s “Pilot” sailing guides of the Mediterranean (I cannot recommend enough The Accidental Sailor).
Graeme Archer
The novel I’ve raved to the point of boring friends about this year is A Natural by Ross Raisin. The natural of the title is Tom, who has just been signed to a mid-league football team. Or is that what it’s about? Say the title quickly to yourself (a natural – an natural – unnatural): the novel is more interested in “Is Tom natural? How can he be both natural, and happy?” because Raisin’s topic, it turns out, is male homosexuality. If you hate football and aren’t interested in homosexuality, then please, I beg you, don’t write off this novel, because the story-telling is superb and Raisin’s style, which could have been arid in the hands of a less talented writer, will make you care about Tom way more than any piece of agitprop could ever manage. One of those novels you finish with a gasp and then stare about you, not quite recognising the world you inhabit.
I also really enjoyed Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman. Honeyman’s skill is to have created an appalling character in whom however you all too easily see yourself; it’s set in Glasgow (hooray); it has a happy ending. Did You See Melody? by the writer of psychological thrillers Sophie Hannah (she also produces new Poirot novels – The Closed Casket, which I enjoyed this year, is as satisfying as anything Christie produced) transposes the claustrophobic closed setting of the classic English murder gothic to a sun-kissed resort in Arizona: it’s great, with a total “no way!” twist of an ending.
Oliver Wiseman
The best book I have read in some time is All The King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize winning novel about Willie Stark, a populist Southern governor. Stark is thought to be based on Senator Huey Long, the evangelising Louisianan Democrat who promised to make “every man a king”. Narrated by Stark’s closest aide, All the King’s Men tracks the transformation of “the boss” from a radical man of the people unexpectedly swept to power during the Depression into exactly the sort of bent insider he had been elected on a promise to bring to heel. But politics is really just the backdrop to a human drama about so much more.
Speaking of bosses, I cannot wait to get my teeth into Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run. I would have read this long-anticipated memoir whatever the reviews said. Happily, it sounds as though the honesty and narrative brilliance of Springsteen the songwriter are there in Springsteen the author. In the book’s first page, he writes, “I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.”
The third part of this accidental American trilogy is The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon. Don’t let the dry title put you off. Gordon, an Economics Professor, brings to life one of the most remarkable stories in human history: the almost immeasurable and innumerable ways in which life in the West got so much better in the century between 1870 and 1970.
Chris Deerin
My two giants of modern American crime/thriller fiction are Don Winslow and Dennis Lehane. Both have recently produced books that are perfectly suited to the summer break – immersive, chunky page-turners that are written with artistry and vim. Winslow’s The Force is his third epic in a row, following his stunning Mexican drug war duo The Power of the Dog and The Cartel (he’s just revealed he working on a third in the series). The Force is the story of Detective Sergeant Denny Malone and his elite NYPD unit, who are charged with using any means necessary to tackle New York’s guns, gangs and drugs. Everyone in this tale, including Malone, his fellow cops, the politicians and the lawyers, is profoundly corrupt. Winslow masterfully controls the sprawling plot before bringing it to the inevitable conclusion.
Lehane’s Since We Fell is the tricksy tale of a novelist who discovers her husband, their marriage and her life is not what it seems. It smartly keeps the reader off balance without ever losing touch, and ends with a gloriously unexpected twist. Both books are genre fiction at its absolute best.
Dominic Green
The best non-fiction I’ve recently read is James Stourton’s Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation, in which Clark is great in public if not always good in private; and Alexandra Harris’s Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination, from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, a brilliant description of how inter-war Modernists returned to rural and Romantic traditions.
In fiction, it’s been Daphne du Maurier’s The Parasites, on the gruesome adulthood of a trio of showbiz brats; and Margaret Drabble’s latest, The Dark Flood Rises, on old age and the passing of a culture.
My holiday reading will be Robert Winder’s The Last Wolf: The Hidden Springs of Englishness, for review; the first part of Kenneth Clark’s autobiography, Another Part of the Wood, for pleasure; and Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. I packed that one last year too, but this time I’m actually going to read it.
Ryan Bourne
Books I have read recently, and enjoyed, include: The Complacent Class by Tyler Cowen, Corruption: What Everyone Needs to Know by Ray Fisman and Miriam Golden and Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama.
My reading list for the rest of the summer: Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do about It by Richard Reeves, which examines how it’s the big differences between the lives of the upper middle class and the rest that matters and is really striking; #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass Sunstein, a timely examination of the impact of social media on democracy from the co-author of Nudge; and – unoriginally – A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin.
