The comprehensive guide to what MPs (and political enthusiasts) should be taking on holiday with them this summer.
Another long summer recess, another long summer reading list for Tory MPs. Keith Simpson, the MP for Broadlands and PPS to William Hague, is waving colleagues off on their holidays with a reading list that is at turns frivolous, light-hearted, educational and enlightening.
Political books broadly fall into two categories: diary and non-diary. Many are unreadable; the cream quickly rises to the top. I haven't read them, but my father says Chris Mullin's diaries are the best since Alan Clark's, so A Walk-On Part might be worth a flick. Alastair Campbell's I have read and they are denser but hugely valuable. Earl Ferrers' memoirs sound interesting. William Rees-Mogg's have been received warmly if unspectacularly in the press, whilst Matthew Parris found the edited Macmillan diaries disappointing. If I were you, I'd read D.R. Thorpe's magisterial Supermac instead.
For the diary intolerant, there is a clutch of stiff, improving books on political and social theory, the best of which is David Willetts' brilliant The Pinch. It has been popping up on these sort of politico lists for a while so is hardly an original pick but there is the added bonus that the new paperback doesn't have a gyrating pig on the jacket. Of the biographies, Ed by Mehdi Hasan and James Macintyre is the most appealing, not least because of Jerry Hayes' recent waspish review for The Spectator.
There is the habitual roll call of plugs for parliamentary colleagues. He spent the Easter recess avoiding the heat waves skulking around the British Library, and now I know why: Kwasi Kwarteng was writing a history book. His Ghosts of Empire - in which Mr Simpson says he 'addresses the realities of the British Empire from its inception to its demise with unresolved disputes in Iraq,....
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