Here are 100 books that Politics fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am a journalist who spent 15 years reporting from all over the world – Kabul, Baghdad, New Delhi, Beijing, Washington D.C. – returning to London in 2015 to report on the UK’s relations with Europe. Then Brexit happened. As a reporter, I’d chronicled the rise of China and India after 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, but I’d failed to understand how far Britain had been consumed by the forces of populism that have roiled all Western democracies. I’ve spent the last eight years reporting on the fallout, from both sides of the English Channel; trying to unpack what went wrong, and see what we can do about it.
This book by Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford – two political scientists at Manchester University – is superlative at unpacking the underlying political currents that fuelled the Brexit vote of 2016.
Of course there were lots of immediate factors that led to the vote to leave, but this book puts the underlying Brexit culture war in its historical context, mixing data and polling insights with forensic analysis.
What you start to see is that the decision of both Tory and Labour politicians to weaponise both EU membership and immigration slowly laid the foundations for Brexit to become the lightning rod issue that has set UK politics on fire these last seven years.
Long-term social and demographic changes - and the conflicts they create - continue to transform British politics. In this accessible and authoritative book Sobolewska and Ford show how deep the roots of this polarisation and volatility run, drawing out decades of educational expansion and rising ethnic diversity as key drivers in the emergence of new divides within the British electorate over immigration, identity and diversity. They argue that choices made by political parties from the New Labour era onwards have mobilised these divisions into politics, first through conflicts over immigration, then through conflicts over the European Union, culminating in the…
I am a journalist who spent 15 years reporting from all over the world – Kabul, Baghdad, New Delhi, Beijing, Washington D.C. – returning to London in 2015 to report on the UK’s relations with Europe. Then Brexit happened. As a reporter, I’d chronicled the rise of China and India after 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, but I’d failed to understand how far Britain had been consumed by the forces of populism that have roiled all Western democracies. I’ve spent the last eight years reporting on the fallout, from both sides of the English Channel; trying to unpack what went wrong, and see what we can do about it.
As a former foreign correspondent based in India, Beijing, and Washington I found myself wanting to press this book by former top UK diplomatic and national security advisor Peter Ricketts into the hands of every British politician I have ever met.
Having spent more than a decade overseas reporting on the UK’s struggle to stay relevant, I was struck on my return to the UK in 2015 at just how myopic and insular British politics had become.
Brexit was the most obvious expression of this. It has left the UK piggy-in-the-middle, between the US and the EU and this book sets out, alongside a wealth of personal anecdote and experience, how the UK needs to think strategically if it is to retain a place at the global top table.
'Thought-provoking and well worth reading' Times Literary Supplement
After decades of peace and prosperity, the international order put in place after World War II is rapidly coming to an end. Disastrous foreign wars, global recession, the meteoric rise of China and India and the COVID pandemic have undermined the power of the West's international institutions and unleashed the forces of nationalism and protectionism.
In this lucid and groundbreaking analysis, one of Britain's most experienced senior diplomats highlights the key dilemmas Britain faces, from trade to security, arguing that international co-operation and solidarity are the…
I am a journalist who spent 15 years reporting from all over the world – Kabul, Baghdad, New Delhi, Beijing, Washington D.C. – returning to London in 2015 to report on the UK’s relations with Europe. Then Brexit happened. As a reporter, I’d chronicled the rise of China and India after 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, but I’d failed to understand how far Britain had been consumed by the forces of populism that have roiled all Western democracies. I’ve spent the last eight years reporting on the fallout, from both sides of the English Channel; trying to unpack what went wrong, and see what we can do about it.
A profound analysis of why the apparently global triumph of Western liberalism in 1989 turned sour for millions of those who believed they were joining a new world order – but came away disappointed.
This book traces how, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the hubris of Western elites helped spawn the populist and opportunistic leaders – from Russia’s Putin, to Hungary’s Orban and Donald Trump in the US – that emerged after the 2008 global financial crisis.
That systemic failure cracked the veneer of the competence of Western capitalism (which had long masked rising inequality and flat middle-class wages) and opened the door to a politics of chaos that seeks to capitalise on that world of chaos, not fix it.
*Winner of the 2020 Lionel Gelber Prize* FINANCIAL TIMES, ECONOMIST, PROSPECT and EVENING STANDARD BOOK OF THE YEAR PICK
A landmark book that completely transforms our understanding of the crisis of liberalism, from two pre-eminent intellectuals
Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance?
In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only in the East but also back in the heartland of the West.
I am a journalist who spent 15 years reporting from all over the world – Kabul, Baghdad, New Delhi, Beijing, Washington D.C. – returning to London in 2015 to report on the UK’s relations with Europe. Then Brexit happened. As a reporter, I’d chronicled the rise of China and India after 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, but I’d failed to understand how far Britain had been consumed by the forces of populism that have roiled all Western democracies. I’ve spent the last eight years reporting on the fallout, from both sides of the English Channel; trying to unpack what went wrong, and see what we can do about it.
As a young reporter in the mid-1990s, I cut my teeth reporting the end of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and the eventual signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement peace deal. That deal was based around a constitutional ambiguity that was rocked by the Brexit vote.
This pithy volume by Queen's University Belfast politics professor Katy Hayward manages to blend absolute concision and with ambition, tracing the history of the Irish border that found itself at the heart of the UK’s often bitter Brexit negotiations with Europe.
Amid so much rhetoric, Hayward trades only in the facts while carefully framing the future choices that Brexit might bring to Northern Ireland.
The Irish border is a manifestation of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. When that relationship has been tense, we have seen the worst effects at the Irish border in the form of violence, controls and barriers. When the relationship has been good, the Irish border has become - to all intents and purposes - open, invisible and criss-crossed with connections. Throughout its short existence, the symbolism of the border has remained just as important as its practical impact.
With the UK's exit from the European Union, the challenge of managing the Irish border as a source and a symbol…
I have been fascinated by the weather since as a schoolboy I avidly followed the cricket scores and the fate of tomorrow’s match. This co-dependence of my passion for cricket with the state of the weather turned into a professional career as, first, a research scientist and then later a professor of geography, I studied the idea of climate and the many ways in which it intersects with our social, ecological and imaginative worlds. As human-caused climate change became a defining public and political issue for the new century, my interests increasingly focused on understanding why people think so differently about the climate, its changes, its future trajectory—and what to do about it.
This short punchy book is written by ex-policy advisor Alex Evans, following his disillusionment with high power international climate politics. Having worked for the British Government and for the UN Secretary-General in the 2000s, Evans realised that scientific evidence and rational arguments were not enough to change the world for the better. In The Myth Gap, he therefore makes the case to recognise – or else to create – different stories, or myths, which provide the orientation and motivation for different people groups to act out change in their own different worlds. No one story will do the job; we need many.
Why, with absolutely no idea what Brexit actually meant, did the UK vote for Brexit? Why, rather than vote for the best-qualified candidate ever to stand as US President, did voters opt for a reality TV star with no political experience? In both cases, the winning side promised change and offered hope. They told a story voters longed to hear. And in the absence of greater, more unifying narratives, then true or not, voters plumped for the best story available. Once upon a time our society was rich in stories. They brought us together and helped us to understand the…
I first started walking in cities at night in my late teens – mainly London but also the Italian cities I travelled through alone when I went interrailing after leaving school. I discovered that cities have a quite different character at night, and that you cannot know the streets of one intimately if you don’t explore it – safely! – after dark. In my professional career as a scholar and lecturer, I have for decades almost unconsciously been drawn to those writers who themselves discovered, to their horror or delight, that the city at night is a foreign country. The books I’ve listed, fictional or non-fictional, are postcards from this foreign land.
Iain Sinclair is London’s finest London poet, even though he hasn’t published poetry for decades, and TheLast London is his elegy to a lost London – a London that is being buried beneath the concrete, glass, and steel of private housing developments. As ever, Sinclair conducts his archaeological excursions into the city and its forgotten precincts by tramping its streets relentlessly – in this book, principally after dark. He records his observations and reconstructs his encounters with others in a hypnotic, poetic prose. Here is a city fading into the night because it is erasing its history…
London. A city apart. Inimitable. Or so it once seemed.
Spiralling from the outer limits of the Overground to the pinnacle of the Shard, Iain Sinclair encounters a metropolis stretched beyond recognition. The vestiges of secret tunnels, the ghosts of saints and lost poets lie buried by developments, the cycling revolution and Brexit. An electrifying final odyssey, The Last London is an unforgettable vision of the Big Smoke before it disappears into the air of memory.
I have spent my entire working life tied to the virtuous cycle of reading, writing, and (I hope) thinking. Since my own first novel came out over twenty years ago, I have never lost my passion for reading, as I suspect that if I did, I would also lose my passion to write, and the fascination with other people and the world that fuels it. All these books have informed, gently or severely, my new novel, High John The Conqueror, encapsulating the incongruous mix between the given and the unbelievable that I find in life, and try to employ in my own work.
Peace’s gutsy novel is an epic literary treatment of The British Miners Strike of the mid-eighties and reads like one long brutal poem to that ugly time. From it I learned that you could be biased, partisan, and full-blooded in a political novel, providing your treatment of your characters and the world they inhabit is consistently honest. Following him I have tried to do justice to a neglected part of rural England in the build up to the Brexit Referendum, politics less a matter of choice, as the very air the characters breathe, informing their outlook and choices like a vast atmospheric bubble none of them are able to live outside.
A major new novel from one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003. Famous for his visceral sequence of novels, The Red Riding Quartet, and acclaimed as the most gifted and original crime writer to have emerged since James Ellroy, in GB84 David Peace turns his talents to the most wrenching, socially devastating and unhappy struggle of the past half century in Britain: the 1984 miner's strike. In his signature clipped prose and through a kaleidoscopic whirl of characters and perspectives, Peace describes the boardroom and coalfield battles; the struggle for influence in government and the dwindling powers of…
I was born in Santiago, Chile, took my first steps in Antwerp, Belgium, and grew up in British Columbia, Canada. In other words, I was a third culture child with an identity crisis that carried on into my twenties. These books have helped me turn my past mistakes into a craft others can enjoy. Like many of the authors on my list, I’ve said yes to just about anything and lived with people from every walk of life. I’m an expert in making mistakes, but I have done one thing well, and that’s learning from people who think differently than I do.
Okay, fine, this book isn’t actually nonfiction, but it’s so accurate and believable that it may as well be. You might not question Clarke’s life choices, but you’ll question Paul West, the protagonist. Have you ever wanted to know what it’s like to be a bureaucrat? Neither have I. But that didn’t stop me from reading this book. As someone who has had to deal with funcionarios (Spanish government employees), bureaucrats aren’t high on my list as people I’d invite to a dinner party, but this book gave me a chance to learn about their lives at a safe distance. I learned something new and laughed out loud on almost every page.
THE POST-BREXIT EDITION - brand new chapters with extra EU chaos for Englishman Paul West.
An Englishman, Paul West, goes to Brussels to work for a French MEP. There he gets an insider's view of what really goes on in the massive madhouse that is the EU Parliament. With the referendum on the horizon, things are even more hysterical than usual.
When the Brexit result comes in, Paul has to make a decision. If he wants to work in Europe, should he apply for a French passport?
But can an Englishman really become French? Can he sing the bloodthirsty 'Marseillaise'?…
Dave has lived with bipolar disorder and severe anxiety all of his adult life. He has also worked with over 800 people with mental illness in a certified peer support role. Dave is a blogger with Bp Magazine for Bipolar and a mental health influencer. His blog posts have been read by over a million people. Dave has been hospitalized, had most of the treatments available for bipolar disorder including ECT. Dave has come out the other side and has the rare ability to put all of his emotions and experiences in his writing with complete openness and honesty, making him a best-selling author about bipolar disorder.
This is the second book about bipolar disorder that my wife read on her journey of understanding this illness. Family members of people with bipolar disorder are usually left in the dark. Loving Someone brings light and hope to the loved ones of people with bipolar disorder.
This fully revised and updated second edition of the bestselling Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder discusses all aspects of readers' relationships with bipolar partners: work, money, sex, medications and their side effects, therapeutic treatments, and more.
Also called manic depressive disorder, bipolar disorder can cause extreme mood swings, and people who suffer from this disorder can alternate between manic and depressed behavior without much warning.
Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder, Second Edition, builds on the practical advice offered in the original book by offering critical new information on the medications that are sometimes prescribed to manage bipolar disorder symptoms. Readers…
Memoirs have crept up on me as favorites. I could list many more. Please let me! As a psychoanalyst, I listen to the pains and struggles of individuals trying to become more at ease with themselves. They engage with their demons and try to make sense of how to manage the way their personal history has created their worldview and how to expand it enough to enter a present. Memoirs are another way of addressing such struggles. They have an elegance and a universality that emerges out of their individual stories. We learn about the other and we learn about ourselves.
Lisa’s husband dies as he is being treated for cancer. She writes about the first year after in which grief, madness, confusion, isolation, and fury coincide with Britain’s beginning Brexit madness. Nothing can be made sense of and yet we need words to express what’s happening. And then words provide for consoling and managing.
After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. Then, too, the cultural and political moment seemed to collude with her condition: everywhere people were dislocated and angry.
In this electrifying and brave examination of an ordinary enough death and its aftermath, Everyday Madness uses all Lisa Appignanesi's evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society's experience of grieving. With searing honesty, lashed by humour, she navigates us onto the…
