82 books like A Very British Coup

This book taught me the meaning of the word “totalitarianism.” It’s like a horror movie you can’t escape from, but instead of a zombie fungus eating your mind, it’s the state controlling every little aspect of your life, down to—and worst of all—the words that you think with, and therefore what you can even conceive of.

Few books have stayed in my mind like this one. Even today—or more than ever—its images come to my mind over and over again when I see what is happening in America and the world.

This book made me think, reflect, and laugh (if a little unnervingly!). It is a quirky tale that warns us of threats to civil liberties from AI and corporate tech giants in a Hitch-hikers' Guide to the Galaxy meets 1984 way.

Some of the writing is lyrical and literary, sometimes perplexing and banal. I was not entirely convinced by the science behind the science-fiction elements, but that is perhaps allowed because of the Theatre of the Absurd approach the author takes.

I was blown away by this book: one of those books that makes you think differently about the world and stays with you. Your classical political thriller is set at the heart of government: the big cheeses and their power games; this, though, is about two ordinary (but exceptional!) young people and how the political climate of Weimar Germany and the rise of Nazism affected their lives.

I much prefer a book like this, about life and what it means to be human. The “thriller” aspect comes from your fear of what might happen and whether their love alone can pull them through. I loved the characters, both the main ones and the secondary ones.

This play profoundly affected me (even though it only played out in my head and not on a real stage). It is both disturbing and moving. It is absurdist, but that nightmarish detachment from reality somehow sends an even stronger shock to the system in its warnings about how fascism takes hold: that strong human tendency towards social thinking (emerging neuroscience research suggests a substantial overlap between physical pain and social pain).

This is much more than just an allegory on authoritarianism, however. Recently, people have used it to explain how easily society gave up on a public health approach to the ongoing Covid pandemic. Maybe getting COVID-19 repeatedly and, at some point, eventually getting long-term COVID-19/turning into a Rhinoceros is not so bad?

Check out Tom Watson’s insider account of similar behaviour within the Labour Party as in House of Cards. Once Deputy Leader, he quit his position because of the “brutality and hostility” within the ranks. It is a good depiction of the sacrifices and betrayals required and shows no party system has the moral high ground when it comes to bullying and duplicitous behaviour.

The story of a courageous working-class woman growing up in the 1870s near Manchester.

Young Hannah, with just a meagre "fortnight’s schooling," had everything against her. But she never stayed down for long: she joined the new Independent Labour Party (ILP), becoming a suffragette. Then, disillusioned with the Pankhursts, Hannah joined the Women’s Freedom League. Later, she became not only a councillor but also a magistrate.

She has an inspiring story of never giving up and always keeping her goals in sight.

Henry Mayhew’s sprawling record of nineteenth-century London can be overwhelming, but his ear for the vernacular and eye for weird detail means that the reader can dip in and find something.

London’s population exploded in the nineteenth century, bulked out by a huge number of itinerant workers. Mayhew interviews these people–in the prologue to the first volume, he describes himself as a "traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor"–and because he gives no judgment on their lives, the book feels more like a modern documentary.

The voices are one thing; Mayhew’s statistics are another–"expenditure in ham sandwiches supplied by street sellers is £1,820 yearly…a consumption of 436,800 sandwiches." Anyone who thinks that Dickens’ writes grotesques should read this. The first book that really brought old London alive for me. 

If you’re looking for a fresh and funny take on romance then, The Midwife Crisis is the book for you. Written in my family’s hometown of Galway, in Island, not only could I relate to this author's story, but it was a new take on a normal love genre.

Did you know that African and indigenous people worked together in what is today Bolivia and Argentina? They were both enslaved and those who had bought their freedom. Bolivia, high in the mountains, might seem remote, but in the 1500s and 1600s its rich silver mines were the motor of the Spanish Empire’s economy. And Spain was the superpower that dominated Europe, America, and the Atlantic.

Bolivia and the zones that supplied it with coerced and free workers, mules, food, wine, textiles, and the stimulant coca leaf was called Charcas, and it was the most valuable and important part of all of the Americas at the time.

This wonderfully detailed book by an outstanding Bolivian historian tells the story of the Black and indigenous laborers who made this possible.

It is rare for anyone with real power to write an interesting diary. They do not have the time or the self-awareness. Harold Macmillan is the exception because his diaries are fantastic and those that he writes as prime minister are much better than those that he writes earlier in his career. He is such a lonely man (England’s most famous cuckold) and one senses that his diary is his only real confidant. He is also so extraordinarily aware of historical change. He is himself a considerable historian and one who reads very widely even when prime minister. There is a moment in the early 1960s when he gets back to Downing Street after a weekend in the country and writes in his diary about having read Theodore Zeldin’s, The Political System of Napoleon III – not exactly bedtime reading for most people but a work that inspires Macmillan into… show more.