Entry type: Long listsTTTT

Rory Peck, Peter Jouvenal, Vaughan Smith, and Nicholas Della Casa were the founder members of an exclusive and dangerous club: the Frontline TV News Agency. Between them, this colourful collection of adventurers and ex-army officers captured some of the key images at the end of the Cold War, and the fractured, fissile world which emerged. Two of them are now dead: killed in action. The way they lived and died was an anachronism; they were eccentrics who might have been happier fighting wars in the British Empire a century before. Instead, they brought back pictures from the worst war zones the late twentieth century had to offer. And it suited them. For the men of Frontline, how things were done was as important as what was done. All four of the founders, and those they recruited, shared the same panache, wit, and disdain for authority, planning the next trip to the Hindu Kush in the bar of the Ritz. Their story reads like a latter-day Rudyard Kipling adventure. But while their lives may have been lived as if they were still playing the Great Game, they also cared passionately about their work and the truth it conveyed. Part Bang Bang Club, part Flashman, Frontline is the gripping story of lives lived to the full in some of the worst places on earth.

• Launch Debate 2009: David Loyn, Lord Ashdown, Peter Beaumont and Michela Wrong, ‘Is journalism failing failing states?’ (video)
• Oxford 2009: David Loyn, James Fergusson and Clare Lockhart, ‘Afghanistan’ (video)
• David Loyn at BBC Newswatch
• David Loyn on Journalisted

Juliet Gardiner’s critically acclaimed book – the first in a generation to tell the people’s story of the Second World War – offers a compelling and comprehensive account of the pervasiveness of war on the Home Front. The book has been commended for its inclusion of many under-described aspects of the Home Front, and alongside familiar stories of food shortages, evacuation and the arrival of the GIs, are stories of Conscientious Objectors, persecuted Italians living in Britain and Lumber Jills working in the New Forest. Drawing on a multitude of sources, many previously unpublished, she tells the story of those six gruelling years in voices from the Orkney Islands to Cornwall, from the Houses of Parliament to the Nottinghamshire mines.

• Juliet Gardiner’s website
• Juliet Gardiner at the Centre for the History of the Book

Acute, questioning, humane and passionately concerned for justice, Helena Kennedy is one of the most powerful voices in legal circles in Britain today. Here she roundly challenges the record of modern governments over the fundamental values of equality, fairness and respect for human dignity. She argues that in the last twenty years we have seen a steady erosion of civil liberties, culminating today in extraordinary legislation, which undermines long established freedoms. Are these moves a crude political response to demands for law and order? Or is the relationship between citizens and the state being covertly reframed and redefined?

• Helena Kennedy, David Halpern, Cristina Odone and Meg Russell, ‘Has the political class been fatally weakened?’, Orwell Prize Shortlist Debate 2010
• Helena Kennedy’s website

A journalistic memoir from one of the most recognisable TV news correspondents in the UK. How do you decide what is a ‘story’ and what isn’t? What does a newspaper editor actually do all day? How do hacks get their scoops? How do the TV stations choose their news bulletins? How do you persuade people to say those awful, embarassing things? Who earns what? How do journalists manage to look in the mirror after the way they sometimes behave? The purpose of this insider’s account is to provide an answer to all these questions and more. Andrew Marr’s brilliant, and brilliantly funny, book is a guide to those of us who read newspapers, or who listen to and watch news bulletins but want to know more. Andrew Marr tells the story of modern journalism through his own experience. This is an extremely readable and utterly unique modern social history of British journalism, with all its odd glamour, smashed hopes and future possibility.

A profound investigation of the history of anti-Westersn stereotypes that traces them back to the West itself. Twenty -five years ago, Edward Said’s Orientalism described the denigrating mirage of ‘the East’ in the Western colonial mind. But as Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit show in this book, ‘the West’ is the more dangerous mirage of our time, and the idea of us in the minds of our self proclaimed enemies is still largely unexamined and misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in others. ‘Radical Islam’ is generally perceived as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma nad Argalit show that this radicalism owes primary debt to the West. Movement like al-Qaeda are stalked by the same Western bogeymen that have haunted the thoughts of revolutionary groups going back to the early nineteenth century. The same elements of the anti-Western worldview appear again and again: the rootless cosmopolitan living in the Western city; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the centre by a cabal of insiders – often Jews – pulling the hidden levers of power. The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, but in no way is it exclusively Islamic matter. A world of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our understanding of the world in which we live.

• Ian Buruma’s website
• Ian Buruma at the New York Review of Books
• Avishai Margalit at the Institute for Advanced Study
• Avishai Margalit at the New York Review of Books

Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is twenty years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London’s East End. Nazneen knows not a word of English, and is forced to depend on her husband. But unlike him she is practical and wise, and befriends a fellow Asian girl Razia, who helps her understand the strange ways of her adopted new British home. Nazneen keeps in touch with her sister Hasina back in the village. But the rebellious Hasina has kicked against cultural tradition and run off in a ‘love marriage’ with the man of her dreams. When he suddenly turns violent, she is forced into the degrading job of garment girl in a cloth factory. Confined in her flat by tradition and family duty, Nazneen also sews furiously for a living, shut away with her buttons and linings – until the radical Karim steps unexpectedly into her life. On a background of racial conflict and tension, they embark on a love affair that forces Nazneen finally to take control of her fate. Strikingly imagined, gracious and funny, this novel is at once epic and intimate. Exploring the role of Fate in our lives – those who accept it; those who defy it – it traces the extraordinary transformation of an Asian girl, from cautious and shy to bold and dignified woman.

The first volume of John Campbell’s biography of Margaret Thatcher was described by Frank Johnson in the Daily Telegraph as ‘much the best book yet written about Lady Thatcher’. That volume, The Grocer’s Daughter, described Mrs Thatcher’s childhood and early career up until the 1979 General Election which carried her into Downing Street. This second volume covers the whole eleven and a half years of her momentous premiership. Thirteen years after her removal from power, this is the first comprehensive and fully researched study of the Thatcher Government from its hesitant beginning to its dramatic end. Campbell draws on the mass of memoirs and diaries of Mrs Thatcher’s colleagues, aides, advisers and rivals, as well as on original material from the Ronald Reagan archive, shedding fascinating new light on the Reagan-Thatcher ‘special relationship’, and on dozens of interviews. The Iron Lady will confirm John Campbell’s Margaret Thatcher as one of the greatest political biographies of recent times.

The story of the Warsaw Rising from the the leading British authority on the history of Poland. Rising ’44 is a brilliant narrative account of one of the most dramatic episodes in 20th century history, drawing on Davies’ unique understanding of the issues and characters involved. In August 1944 Warsaw offered the Wehrmacht the last line of defence against the Red Army’s march from Moscow to Berlin. When the Red Army reached the river Vistula, the people of Warsaw believed that liberation had come. The Resistance took to the streets in celebration, but the Soviets remained where they were, allowing the Wehrmacht time to regroup and Hitler to order that the city of Warsaw be razed to the ground. For 63 days the Resistance fought on in the cellars and the sewers. Defenceless citizens were slaughtered in their tens of thousands. One by one the City’s monuments were reduced to rubble, watched by Soviet troops on the other bank of the river. The Allies expressed regret but decided that there was nothing to be done, Poland would not be allowed to be governed by Poles. The sacrifice was in vain and the Soviet tanks rolled in to the flattened city. It is a hugely dramatic story, vividly and authoritatively told by one of our greatest historians.

• NormanDavies.com

Supping with the Devils is the first collection of Hugo Young’s journalism. In it, he interprets the major events that have punctuated British political life, but it also considers subjects as diverse as the nature and future of the British state; the crisis of religious belief; and Britain’s place in the world. Urgent, penetrating and always original, these articles – taken from The Guardian, New Yorker and London Review of Books, among others – constitute a brilliant chronicle of a transformative period in British history.

• Winner of a Special Orwell Prize 2004
• Guardian tribute to Hugo Young, 1938-2003

For the last fifty years, the German Occupation of France has been regarded as a period characterised by four things: cold, hunger, the absence of freedom and above all fear; a time when the indigenous population was cruelly and consistently oppressed by the army of occupation. The people of France were either bold members of the Resistance or craven collaborators. In this riveting and provocative study, Robert Gildea reveals a rather different story, a story which shows that the truth lies – as so often – somewhere in between. The winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2002.

• Robert Gildea at the University of Oxford