Category: Long listsTTTT

Chris Mullin

Chris Mullin’s bestselling A View From the Foothills provided a riveting insider’s account of life as a junior minister. Laying bare the personalities, pyrotechnics and political intrigues of the Blair years, it was described as Yes, Minister meets Alan Clark. Funny and self-deprecating, the new diaries run from his sacking by Blair as a minister after the 2005 elections to Election Day 2010 as he prepared to step down after 23 years as an MP wryly observing ‘they say failed politicians make the best diarists, in which case I am in with a chance.’

Oliver Bullough

The Caucasus mountains form Russia’s southern border and run from the Crimea to the Caspian Sea. Their jagged white peaks inspired Pushkin and Lermontov, overshadowed decades of guerrilla warfare and were explored by 19th century British mountaineers, but the region is better known to us now (if it is at all) for the struggle in Chechnya and the 2008 summer war between Georgia and Russia over South Ossetia.

In Let Our Fame Be Great Oliver Bullough takes the reader through Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Turkey and the Middle East, tracking down the nations dispersed by the brutal wars Russia fought to add these mountains to its empire. Then he journeys through the North Caucasus itself, telling the stories of the land and its peoples. Many of the events he uncovers have never been described in English, while some have never been written about in any language.

Let Our Fame Be Great recounts the struggle and survival of peoples who have been mostly forgotten for two hundred years. Their fame is not great, but truly it deserves to be.

Lesley Riddoch

Lesley Riddoch is one of Scotland’s best known commentators and broadcasters.  She has held many influential positions including assistant editor of The Scotsman and contributing editor of the Sunday Herald.  She is perhaps best known for her broadcasting with programmes on Radio 4, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio Scotland, for which she has won two Sony speech broadcaster awards.

Lesley runs her own independent radio and podcast company, Feisty Ltd, which has produced several series including a weekly topical phone-in programme for BBC Radio Scotland.  She is a weekly columnist for The Scotsman and the Sunday Post and a regular contributor to The Guardian’s Comment is Free.

Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for The Guardian since 1997. He also writes a monthly column for the Jewish Chronicle, as well as presenting BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View.

He served for four years as The Guardian’s Washington correspondent and has written for a variety of US publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. US affairs remain a keen interest, along with British politics and the Middle East.

He has written two books, Jacob’s Gift (2005) and Bring Home the Revolution: the Case for a British Republic (1998).

Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens is a columnist and reporter for the Mail on Sunday, having previously reported from Moscow and Washington for the Daily Express. He has contributed to other publications, such as Prospect and The Guardian, authored documentaries on Channel 4 and the BBC, and appeared elsewhere on radio and television.

Peter has also written a number of books, including The Rage Against God, The Cameron Delusion, The Broken Compass, The Abolition of Britain, The Abolition of Liberty and A Brief History of Crime.

Jonathan Freedland

Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for The Guardian since 1997. He also writes a monthly column for the Jewish Chronicle, as well as presenting BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View.

He served for four years as The Guardian’s Washington correspondent and has written for a variety of US publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. US affairs remain a keen interest, along with British politics and the Middle East.

He has written two books, Jacob’s Gift (2005) and Bring Home the Revolution: the Case for a British Republic (1998).

Martin Bright

Longlisted for work published by the New Statesman.

Martin Bright began his journalistic career writing in very simple English for a magazine aimed at French school children. This experience has informed his style ever since. He worked for the BBC World Service, and The Guardian before joining The Observer as Education Correspondent. He went on to become Home Affairs Editor before becoming the New Statesman’s political editor in 2005. He left the New Statesman in January 2009, and started blogging on Spectator.co.uk. He was appointed political editor of the Jewish Chronicle in August 2009.

John Rentoul

John Rentoul is chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday, and visiting fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches contemporary history. Previously he was chief leader writer for The Independent. He has written a biography of Tony Blair, whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning.

Roy Foster

In this bold, provocative and extremely funny book Roy Foster demolishes the clichés that surround Ireland’s past, examining how key moments from its history have been turned into myths – and, more recently, airbrushed and repackaged for Hollywood and popular culture. Whether discussing the ‘misery tourism’ of Famine theme parks, ideas of mystical Celticism, the contested ‘Irishness’ of Yeats or the sentimentalized childhoods of Angela’s Ashes and Gerry Adams’s memoir, The Irish Story brilliantly separates the tall tales from the truth.

Richard Weight

A brilliant cultural, political and social history of British national identity from our ‘finest hour’ in the dark days of 1940 to the Millennium celebrations of Blair’s Britain.

Who are the British today? For nearly three hundred years British national identity was a unifying force in times of glory and despair. It has now virtually disappeared. In Patriots, Richard Weight explores the decline of Britishness and the rise of powerful new identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Based on a wealth of original research, it is scholarly in depth and scope, yet never departs from a thoroughly readable and entertaining style.

Iain Sinclair

Encircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when Iain Sinclair sets out to walk this asphalt loop- keeping within the ‘acoustic footprints’- he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developers. London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you’ve never seen it before.

Matthew Parris

A frank autobiography by Times columnist and ex-politician Matthew Parris. His childhood was spent on a variety of different countries as his engineer father moved jobs; Rhodesia, Cyprus, the Middle East and Jamaica. After Cambridge and Yale, he joined the Conservative central office at roughly the same time (aged 26) he discovered he was gay. He worked for Michael Dobbs, Chris Patten, and Mrs Thatcher (who famously fired him), before entering parliament himself. Part participant, part bystander, Matthew Parris describes what it was like to be so close to the centre and remain an outsider.

Robert Gildea

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.

Neal Ascherson

Neal Ascherson is one of Britain’s finest writers in an undefinable genre that fuses history, memoir, politics and meditations on places. His books on Poland and his collected essays on the strange Britain to which he returned from Europe in the mid 1980s were deeply influential. In 1995, Black Sea won critical praise in many languages and several literary prizes. Stone Voices is Ascherson’s return to his native Scotland. It is an exploration of Scottish identity, but this is no journalistic rumination on the future of that small nation. Ascherson instead weaves together a story of deep time – the time of geology and archaeology, of myth and legend – with the story of modern Scotland and its rebirth. Few writers in these islands have his ability to write so well about the natural context of history.