Entry type: WinnersTTTT

This is the gripping story of the men of the Welsh Guards and their bloody battle for survival in Afghanistan in 2009. Underequipped and overstretched, they found themselves in the most intense fighting the British had experienced in a generation. They were led into battle by Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, a passionate believer in the justness of the war who was deeply dismayed by the way it was being resourced and conducted. Thorneloe was killed by an IED during Operation Panther’s Claw, the biggest operation mounted by the British in Helmand.

Dead Men Risen draws on secret documents written by Thorneloe, which raise questions from beyond the grave that will unnerve politicians and generals alike. The Welsh Guards also lost Major Sean Birchall, commanding officer of IX Company, and Lieutenant Mark Evison, a platoon commander whose candid personal diary was unnervingly prophetic. Not since the Korean War had a single British battalion lost officers at the three key levels of leadership.

Harnden transports the reader into the heart of a conflict in which a soldier has to be prepared to kill and die, to ward off paralysing fear and watch comrades perish in agony. Given unprecedented access to the Welsh Guards, Harnden conducted hundreds of interviews in Afghanistan, England and Wales. He weaves the experiences of the guardsmen and the loved ones they left behind into a seamless and unsparing narrative that sits alongside a piercing analysis of the political and military strategy. No other book about modern warfare succeeds on so many levels.

Taken from Quercus

Judges of the 2012 Book Prize, Helena Kennedy, Miranda Carter and Sameer Rahim, said; ‘It sometimes seems that we only care about the soldiers fighting in our names when they are killed. Once the platitudes are over we forget about them. Toby Harnden’s remarkable book takes us into the hearts and minds of the Welsh Guards in a way that is both compelling and visceral. It challenges every citizen of this country to examine exactly what we’re asking soldiers to do in Afghanistan. And rather than offering easy answers it lets the soldiers speak for themselves.’

‘The Rule of Law’ is a phrase much used but little examined. The idea of the rule of law as the foundation of modern states and civilisations has recently become even more talismanic than that of democracy, but what does it actually consist of?

In this brilliant short book, Britain’s former senior law lord, and one of the world’s most acute legal minds, examines what the idea actually means. He makes clear that the rule of law is not an arid legal doctrine but is the foundation of a fair and just society, is a guarantee of responsible government, is an important contribution to economic growth and offers the best means yet devised for securing peace and co-operation. He briefly examines the historical origins of the rule, and then advances eight conditions which capture its essence as understood in western democracies today. He also discusses the strains imposed on the rule of law by the threat and experience of international terrorism.

The book will be influential in many different fields and should become a key text for anyone interested in politics, society and the state of our world. Tom Bingham died in September 2010.

• Tribute to Lord Bingham from Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge (BBC Radio 4 Today)
• The Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law

Can our personalities be taken away from us? Are memory and identity mutually dependent? What exactly is the soul? Three years ago, Andrea Gillies, a writer and mother of three, took on the care of her mother-in-law Nancy, who was in the middle stages of Alzheimer’s disease. This newly extended family moved to a big Victorian house on a headland in the far, far north of Scotland, where the author failed to write a novel and Nancy, her disease accelerated by change, began to move out of the rational world and into dementia’s alternative reality.

This book is a journal of life in this wild location, in which Gillies tracks Nancy’s unravelling grasp on everything that we think of as ordinary, and interweaves her own brilliantly cogent investigations into the way Alzheimer’s works. For the family at the centre of this drama, the learning curve was steeper and more interesting than anyone could have imagined.

Winner of the Orwell Prize 2010 and the inaugural Wellcome Prize 2009.

• Read the first chapter
• Buy the book (Short Books)
• Buxton Festival 2010: Andrea Gillies in conversation with Rebecca Nicolson (video)
• Inside a dementia ward (The Guardian)
• The raw horror of Alzheimer’s (Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian)
• Andrea Gillies: The White Lie

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Sweden was an affluent, egalitarian country envied around the world. Refugees were welcomed, even misfit young Englishmen could find a place there.

Andrew Brown spent part of his childhood in Sweden during the 1960s. In the 1970s he married a Swedish woman and worked in a timber mill while helping to raise their small son. Fishing became his passion and his escape. In the mid-1980s his marriage and the country fell apart. The Prime Minister was assassinated. The welfare system crumbled along with the industries that had supported it. Twenty years later, Andrew Brown travelled the length of Sweden in search of the country he had loved, and then hated, and now found he loved again.

• Buxton Festival 2009: Andrew Brown in conversation with David Blunkett (video)
• Sigrid Rausing: On Sweden, state power and Susan Sontag – what Fishing in Utopia means to the publisher
• The death of a dream: Andrew Brown and Sigrid Rausing in conversation (New Statesman)
• Helmintholog – Andrew Brown’s blog
• Andrew Brown on Journalisted

Palestine is a land of biblical beauty – of olive groves, grapevines, stone buildings, rolling hills, wadis and cliffs.  It is also a land of violence and war. Human rights lawyer and writer Raja Shehadeh has lived on the West Bank since his family fled Jaffa in 1948. A peace activist of independent temper, he has seen at first hand the horrors of occupation – including the siege of Ramallah.  For decades Raja has found comfort in walking, following what in Arab culture is called sarha – meaning to roam  freely, at will, without restraint: to go where the spirit  takes you.

In Palestinian Walks he invites the reader to come along for the unique experience of a sarha in Palestine. The six walks that comprise the book span a period of twenty six years evoking the land, its history and some of Palestinian’s political struggles, disappointments and hope. Palestinian Walks describes a vanishing landscape. Raja takes us to beautiful hills, past rivers and sacred springs, to famous landmarks from A’yn Qenya, the Shukba Caves, from Wadi Qelt to the Dead Sea (now receding by a metre every year thanks to Israel’s diversion of the river Jordan, an environmental catastrophe in the making).

We take a walk with Selma Hasan, a PLO functionary from Tunis, who returned after the Oslo Accords (a settlement that undermined decades of Raja’s legal work on land rights).  And we experience the everyday humiliations and harassment by Israeli soldiers – including a chance meeting with a settler who lives next to Raja’s hometown. But there are also moments of extraordinary beauty:

To my left at the perfectly still waters of the [Dead] Sea, transformed by the sun into a luminous platinum sheet, and to my right at the formidable wall of incandescent rock along which we were travelling, towering steeply, challengingly, seemingly an impenetrable line of defence, a mighty gateway into another world.

 

Palestinian Walks shows how Raja’s life, and the fate of the landscape are utterly intertwined.  It is an intensely personal account of life in one of the world’s most troubled regions, and a poignant story of how a pleasure so many of us take for granted – the freedom to roam through the countryside – is being destroyed.

• Raja Shehadeh – Palestinian Walks, Chapter 7
• Two Walks – Marina Lewycka and Raja Shehadeh (PDF) (and Google Map)
• Raja Shehadeh, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, London 2008
• Palestinian Walks – slideshow narrated by Raja Shehadeh

Having It So Good evokes Britain emerging from the shadow of war and the privations of austerity and rationing into growing affluence. Peter Hennessy takes his readers into the front-rooms where the Coronation was watched on television, to the classrooms and now coffee bars of 1950s Britain – and also into the secret Cabinet rooms in which decisions about the British nuclear bomb were taken and plans made for the catastrophe of nuclear war. He brings to life the ageing Churchill, in his last faltering spell as Prime Minister, the highly-strung Anthony Eden taking his country to war in the teeth of American opposition and world opinion, and the rise of ‘Supermac’ Harold Macmillan, gliding over problems with his Edwardian insouciance.

Above all, Having It So Good captures the smell and the flavour of an extraordinary decade in which affluence and anxiety combined to produce their own winds of change.

The judges said:

A marvellous history which seamlessly places high, intimate political history of the 50s, nuclear planning, Suez, and its characters in the context of British holidays and ice-cream. It re-invents history, all exuberantly done in Peter’s inimitable voice.

• Peter Hennessy at Queen Mary, University of London