Entry type: Long listsTTTT

The Refuge and the Fortress deals with British attitudes towards people fleeing racial, religious or political persecution in their own country. Current prejudice against asylum seekers is not new. It echoes much of the rhetoric that greeted Jewish refugees from Tsarist pogroms at the turn of the 20th century, and those escaping Hitler in the 1930s. But this only tells half the story. As well as rejection and hostility, there has always been a characteristically British generosity and kindness towards those who have suffered cruelty and injustice. The book tries to make sense of these conflicting responses. At times, it seems, Britain offers a tale of two countries – the xenophobic and the open-hearted. The aim of the book is to make sense of these apparent contradictions, through direct testimonies of refugees and their descendants over the past 75 years. In doing so, we can also gain an insight into the elusive quality of what it means to be British – a question which is now at the centre of much social and political debate.

• Jeremy Seabrook’s website
• Jeremy Seabrook on Journalisted

Eva Figes and her family fled the horror of Nazi Germany when Eva was only six, forced to leave behind them friends, relatives and their housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, Edith suddenly re-enters their lives. Having miraculously survived wartime Berlin, she had reluctantly emigrated to hostile, volatile Palestine. Recounting Edith’s story, Figes boldly argues that Israel was a product of US foreign policy and continuing and widespread anti-Semitism. Part memoir, part brave polemic, Journey to Nowhere is both a moving account of post-war displacement and a fierce attack on America’s role in the Middle East.

After 9/11. George W. Bush’s administration declared that they were going to have to work through ‘the dark side’. And they did: they turned their backs on international law and on America’s history of respecting human rights. They wanted only legal advice that made it okay to torture, and they made sure they got it. Voices of dissent were sidelined, while low level officials brainstormed interrogation techniques and took their lead from Jack Bauer in 24. In Torture Team, Philippe Sands tracks down and interviews those responsible, and makes a compelling case that, in an ugly blotch on Americda’s recent past, war crimes were committed for which no one has yet been held to account.

• Philippe Sands at UCL
• Philippe Sands on Journalisted

‘Finally I was forced to admit that I work in a corrupted profession.’ When award-winning journalist Nick Davies decided to break Fleet Street’s unwritten rule by investigating his own colleagues, he found that the business of reporting the truth had been slowly subverted by the mass production of ignorance. Working with a network of off-the-record sources, Davies uncovered the story of the prestigious Sunday newspaper which allowed the CIA and MI6 to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom which routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; the newspapers which support law and order while paying cash bribes to bent detectives. Davies names names and exposes the national stories which turn out to be pseudo events manufactured by the PR industry, and the global news stories which prove to be fiction generated by a new machinery of international propaganda. He shows the impact of this on a world where consumers believe a mass of stories which, in truth, are as false as the idea that the Earth is flat – from the millennium bug to the WMD in Iraq – tainting government policy, perverting popular belief. He presents a new model for understanding news. With the help of researchers from Cardiff University, who ran a ground-breaking analysis of our daily news, Davies found most reporters, most of the time, are not allowed to dig up stories or check their facts – a profession corrupted at the core. Read All About It. The news will never look the same again.

• Nick Davies on Journalisted
• Nick Davies on Twitter

What kind of hypocrite should voters choose as their next leader? The question seems utterly cynical. But, as David Runciman suggests, it is actually much more cynical to pretend that politics can ever be completely sincere. The most dangerous form of political hypocrisy is to claim to have a politics without hypocrisy. Political Hypocrisy is a timely, and timeless, book on the problems of sincerity and truth in politics, and how we can deal with them without slipping into hypocrisy ourselves. Runciman tackles the problems through lessons drawn from some of the great truth-tellers in modern political thought – Hobbes, Mandeville, Jefferson, Bentham, Sidgwick, and Orwell – and applies his ideas to different kinds of hypocritical politicians from Oliver Cromwell to Hillary Clinton. Runciman argues that we should accept hypocrisy as a fact of politics, but without resigning ourselves to it, let alone cynically embracing it. We should stop trying to eliminate every form of hypocrisy, and we should stop vainly searching for ideally authentic politicians. Instead, we should try to distinguish between harmless and harmful hypocrisies and should worry only about its most damaging varieties. Written in a lively style, this book will change how we look at political hypocrisy and how we answer some basic questions about politics: What are the limits of truthfulness in politics? And when, where, and how should we expect our politicians to be honest with us, and about what?

• David Runciman at the University of Cambridge
• David Runciman at the London Review of Books
• David Runciman on Journalisted

Muqtada al-Sadr, leader of the Shia insurgency and the Mehdi Army, is the most important political figure in post-occupation Iraq. At first grossly underestimated by the US, Muqtada has become the kingmaker of this divided country through a potent combination of nationalism and religious fervour. This is the first biography of the controversial and influential cleric, and draws on Patrick Cockburn’s more than thirty years of reporting from the Middle East, as well as being one of the few books to be based on interviews with Iraqi eyewitnesses. Muqtada al-Sadr is compulsory reading for anyone who wishes to understand the current state of Iraq. This paperback edition includes a new afterword which updates the story of Muqtada’s rise.

• Winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2009
• Patrick Cockburn on Journalisted