Category: Long listsTTTT

Michael Settle is the UK political editor of The Herald.

Submitted articles

• How Shilpa Shetty transformed the old waxworks
• El Dave’s wit cuts deep into El Toro’s hide
• Tears, cheers and jeers as the long goodbye comes to an end

Other links

• Michael Settle on Journalisted

Alec Russell is the commentand anlysis editor of the Financial Times, having previously been world news editor. He started his career as a journalist in Romania in the aftermath of the December 1989 revolution. He was in Bosnia and Croatia during the war from 1991 to 1993 and then spent five years based in South Africa as the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent.  He then became the paper’s foreign editor for the Iraq War. In 2007 he returned to South Africa for the Financial Times for a second stint.

Alec has written three books: Prejudice and Plum Brandy, about his time in the Balkans; Big Men, Little Men, a reflection on his time in South Africa in the mid 90s; and After Mandela, about South Africa under Mbeki. His writing has won several awards and his dispatches from southern Africa have earned him nominations for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and for British foreign correspondent of the year.

Submitted articles

• Softly, softly: Mbeki seeks ways to limit chaos to the north and tensions within
• No end in sight Zimbabwe groans amid shortages and spiralling inflation
• A long journey
• Fenced in: Why land reform in South Africa is losing its pace
• The new colonialists
• The left-leaning Zulu

Other links

• Alec Russell on Journalisted

As well as writing a column for The Observer, Henry Porter has published six novels, including the recent The Dying Light and Brandenburg (which won the Ian Fleming Crime Writers’ Association Steel Dagger as the best thriller of 2005). He has also written one non-fiction title, Lies Damned Lies, a study of truthfulness in British journalism. He has written for the Sunday Times, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph and the Evening Standard. He is the London editor of Vanity Fair magazine.

Submitted articles

• Each DNA swab brings us closer to a police state
• There’s no justice in locking up suspects for 56 days
• We must not tolerate this putsch against our freedoms
• A mass movement is needed to tackle the state’s snoopers
• At last the great divide is coming into focus

Other links

• Henry Porter’s website
• Henry Porter on Journalisted

Bronwen Maddox is Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times, in which she writes the World Briefing. From 1996 to 1999, she was the paper’s Washington Bureau Chief and US Editor. Previously, she was at the Financial Times, where she was an investigative reporter.

Submitted articles

• Putin raises spectre of nuclear war in Europe
• Courageous and liberal, yes – but an unreliable partner for the West
• In the 21st century a venerable brains trust may be dragged down by the weight of its past
• Wishful thinking will not cure economic ills
• Cracks under surface of the £5bn Labour mission for world’s poor
• It is misleading for ministers to claim moral victory for this game of bluff

Other links

• Bronwen Maddox’s website
• Bronwen Maddox on Journalisted

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.

Submitted articles

• Radical Islam: ministers get the message
• The darker side of Dave
• Man of straw
• “Brown and Cameron are illiterate and parochial”
• Calamity Brown

Other links

• Martin Bright’s blog at Spectator.co.uk
• Martin Bright at New Deal of the Mind
• Martin Bright on Journalisted

Drawing on a wide range of historical examples, Graham Stewart explores the intriguing question of whether friendship can survive the pressures of public life. He examines in detail three relationships from across centuries and nations to illustrate how people in power cope with the pleasures and pitfalls of friendship in public life.

His first example, Courtiers, tells the story of Queen Anne and Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, and shows how the introduction of a new ‘favourite’ can ensure a powerfully jealous reaction from the long standing friend who is displaced. His second example, Revolutionaries, relates the tale of one of the United States’ greatest Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, and his relationship with his longest serving political partner, Joseph Galloway. Here were two ambitious men whose friendship was broken in bitterness by divided loyalties during the American War of Independence. The third example, Liberals, brings us back to Britain and the friendship between Herbert Henry Asquith and his best friend Richard Burdon Haldane. Their relationship helped ensure that one became Prime Minister and the other Lord Chancellor, but as Stewart sums up ‘with success came harsh political necessities, and only one of them was marked out to pay the sacrifice.’ Indeed it is Stewart’s view that ‘great leaders usually find that when they reach the summit they are alone.’

We see how single-mindedness, indeed selfishness, appears a necessary quality in the scramble for preferment and how friendship can so quickly turn into rivalry. Incisive and thought-provoking, Friendship & Betrayal is a fascinating examination of an age old dilemma that continues to animate public life today.

• Graham Stewart and Jean Seaton discuss the Orwell Prize 2008 longlist, BBC Radio 4 Today (08:35)
• Graham Stewart’s website
• Graham Stewart on Journalisted

Tim Phillips’ book tells the human story of the siege – of the terrible toll that thirst, hunger and sleeplessness took on the hostages, of the bravery of those who dealt with the terrorists, such as the elderly headmistress of the school and the doctor who tried to relieve the suffering of the young children. Phillips also looks at the authorities’ response to the siege and finds it severely wanting. He has spent time in Beslan researching the book, talking to those involved and those affected, listening to the conspiracy theories, and trying to set the events of September 2004 in their wider context of centuries of conflict and enmity in the Caucasus.

A History of Modern Britain confronts head-on the victory of shopping over politics. It tells the story of how the great political visions of New Jerusalem or a second Elizabethan Age, rival idealisms, came to be defeated by a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification. In each decade, political leaders think they know what they are doing, but find themselves confounded. Every time, the British people turn out to be stroppier and harder to herd than predicted.

Throughout, Britain is a country on the edge – first of invasion, then of bankruptcy, then on the vulnerable front line of the Cold War and later in the forefront of the great opening up of capital and migration now reshaping the world. This history follows all the political and economic stories, but deals too with comedy, cars, the war against homosexuals, Sixties anarchists, oil-men and punks, Margaret Thatcher’s wonderful good luck, political lies and the true heroes of British theatre.

• Andrew Marr on Journalisted

An eye-opening and vital account of the future of our earth, and our civilisation, if current rates of global warming persist, by the highly acclaimed author of High Tide.

Picture yourself a few decades from now, in a world in which average temperatures are three degrees higher than they are now. On the edge of Greenland, rivers ten times the size of the Amazon are gushing off the ice sheet into the north Atlantic. Displaced victims of North Africa’s drought establish a new colony on Greenland’s southern tip, one of the few inhabitable areas not already crowded with environmental refugees. Vast pumping systems keep the water out of most of Holland, but the residents of Bangladesh and the Nile Delta enjoy no such protection. Meanwhile, in New York, a Category 5-plus superstorm pushes through the narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn, devastating waterside areas from Long Island to Manhattan. Pakistan, crippled by drought brought on by disappearing Himalayan glaciers, sees 27 million farmers flee to refugee camps in neighbouring India. Its desperate government prepares a last-ditch attempt to increase the flow of the Indus river by bombing half-constructed Indian dams in Kashmir. The Pakistani president authorises the use of nuclear weapons in the case of an Indian military counter-strike. But the biggest story of all comes from South America, where a conflagration of truly epic proportions has begun to consume the Amazon…

Alien as it all sounds, Mark Lynas’s incredible new book is not science-fiction; nor is it sensationalist. The title, Six Degrees, refers to the terrifying possibility that average temperatures will rise by up to six degrees within the next hundred years. This is the first time we have had a reliable picture of how the collapse of our civilisation will unfold unless urgent action is taken. Most vitally, Lynas’s book serves to highlight the fact that the world of 2100 doesn’t have to be one of horror and chaos. With a little foresight, some intelligent strategic planning, and a reasonable dose of good luck, we can at least halt the catastrophic trend into which we have fallen – but the time to act is now.

• Mark Lynas’ website