Friday 16 June 2017

The Knives in the Guardian's Best of Westminster



I’m honoured to have made the cut for this Guardian Books list of the Top 10 books about Westminster politics, as selected by the novelist and ex-BBC reporter Terri Stiatsny. 

Having had a go at a similar list in the past I know it would be a hard thing to get to a Top 20 without resorting to filler material, i.e. the great many books that depict democratically elected politicians as venal, craven, thieving scum, which is to speak of books that don’t have much to do with life itself – since, as Senator Silas Radcliffe, anti-hero of Henry Adams’ Democracy, puts it, ‘No representative government can long be much better or much worse than the society it represents.’


So, a thoroughly agreeable thing for me to rubbing shoulders with Hilary Mantel, House of Cards, James Graham’s This House, and the Alans Clark and Hollinghurst...

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