Category: Short listsTTTT

Alex Massie

Posted on February 27, 2012 by - Long lists, Short lists

Alex Massie is a freelance journalist, currently based in the Scottish Borders. He spent five years in Washington DC as a correspondent for The Scotsman and the Daily Telegraph. Prior to that he was Assistant Editor and Chief Leader Writer for Scotland on Sunday. He has also worked as a sports journalist and as a magazine feature writer. He blogs about American, British and Scottish politics and culture. And cricket.
Taken from Alex Massie on The Spectator


Submitted posts

Ireland and the Kubler-Ross Model of Grief

Muckle Eck’s Big Mo

Stray Thoughts on the Execution of Osama bin Laden

This Social Union, This Commonwealth

A Bill That Shames Scotland

Stephen Birrell’s Conviction Shames Scotland

Rick Perry: Texas Gaullist

Westminster’s Festina Affair

Rebekah Brooks: I Am Not A Witch, I’m You

Tinker, Tailor, Banker, Spy


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Alex Massie on Twitter

Duncan McLaren

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Duncan McLaren’s touching and tender online diaries about visiting his mother, Mabel, in her care home.

In 2003, Duncan McLaren’s mother had a stroke and he moved from London in order to live with his parents in Perthshire. For a few years, while helping in the family home, he was able to carry on writing about the individuals whose creativity fascinated him. Looking For Enid: The Mysterious and Inventive Life of Enid Blyton was awarded Saga Magazine’s Grown-Up Award for Non-Fiction in 2007. However, further deterioration in his mum’s health caused by strokes and falls resulted in her moving to a care home and since then Duncan’s writing has focused on Mabel.

Submitted blogposts

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Catherine Mayer

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Catherine Mayer is London Bureau Chief for TIME, covering the U.K. and Ireland, as well as Germany and wider European themes and subjects. She has also worked as Senior Editor for TIME Europe, Middle East and Africa. In November 2010, Mayer received an award for Story of the Year at the 2010 Foreign Press Association Media Awards for her cover story on British Prime Minister David Cameron’s first official visit to the U.S. She has previously worked for Focus magazine, Germany’s leading news weekly; International Management, the journal of European Business; Business Traveller magazine; and The Economist. Her book Amortality: The Pleasures and Perils of Living Agelessly will be published by Vermilion, an imprint of Random House, in May 2011.

Submitted articles

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Daniel Hannan

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Daniel Hannan is a writer and journalist, and has been Conservative MEP for South East England since 1999. He speaks French and Spanish and loves Europe, but believes that the European Union is making its constituent nations poorer, less democratic and less free.

Submitted blogposts

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Nelson Jones (Heresiarch)

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Confined by Lucifer to one of the lower circles of Hell, the Heresiarch nevertheless continues to campaign against all forms of orthodoxy.

Submitted blogposts

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Amelia Gentleman

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Amelia Gentleman writes on social affairs for The Guardian. She was nominated for the Martha Gellhorn journalism award in 2010, as well as being shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Previously she was New Delhi correspondent for the International Herald Tribune. She won first prize for feature and comment writing in the 2007 Amnesty International Hong Kong Human Rights Press Awards. She won the Ramnath Goenka prize 2007 for best foreign correspondent covering India. Formerly Paris and Moscow correspondent for The Guardian.

Submitted articles

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Declan Walsh

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Submitted articles published by The Guardian, The Observer and Granta.

Declan Walsh is The Guardian’s foreign correspondent for Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Submitted articles

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Paul Mason

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

I’m Paul Mason, Newsnight’s economics editor, a job that takes me from Kenyan shanty towns to Russian hedge funds and Chinese factories. My blog is called Idle Scrawl. It veers wildly across the subject: from house prices, to global poverty; from deconstructing glib terminology to devastating critiques of the England football management. It is occasionally meant to be funny.

Submitted blogposts

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Philip Collins

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Philip Collins is a columnist and leader writer for The Times. He is also the chair of the board of trustees at the independent think tank Demos and a visiting fellow in the public policy unit at the University of Oxford. Before joining The Times he was the Chief Speech Writer for the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Director of the Social Market Foundation think tank and an Equity Strategist at two investment banks.

Submitted articles

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Gideon Rachman

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Gideon Rachman became chief foreign affairs columnist for the Financial Times in July 2006. He joined the FT after a 15-year career at The Economist, which included spells as a foreign correspondent in Brussels, Washington and Bangkok. He also edited The Economist’s business and Asia sections. His particular interests include American foreign policy, the European Union and globalisation. He is the author of Zero-Sum World, published by Atlantic Books in November 2010.

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Molly Bennett

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Married to Max and mother of two teenage children, Molly Bennett works for a Labour MP and “celebrated” a significant birthday just days after the Party lost the General Election. According to Bridget Jones, Molly is a Smug Married – so why doesn’t she feel smug? Is she suffering from a Mid-Wife crisis, or has working for New Labour just taken its toll? Molly’s story begins in early May…..but where will this year take her?

Submitted blogposts

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Cath Elliott

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Submitted blogposts published at Too Much to Say For Myself, Comment is Free and Liberal Conspiracy.

I’m Cath Elliott, a freelance writer, blogger and researcher, an unapologetic feminist, and a trade union activist. This is my personal blog.

Submitted blogposts

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Rachel Shabi

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Rachel Shabi was born in Israel to Iraqi Jews and grew up in England. A journalist, she has written for a variety of national and international newspapers such as The Guardian, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, the Independent on Sunday, Al-Jazeera English online, the National, Jane’s and Salon.com. For the past five years she has been based in Israel and reporting on the Middle East conflict. Her book, Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, was published by Yale University Press in 2009.

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D. R. Thorpe

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Great-grandson of a crofter and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) was both complex as a person and influential as a politician. Marked by terrible experiences in the trenches in the First World War and by his work as an MP during the Depression, he was a Tory rebel – an outspoken backbencher, opposing the economic policies of the 1930s and the appeasement policies of his own government. Churchill gave him responsibility during the Second World War with executive command as ‘Viceroy of the Mediterrranean’. After the War, in opposition, Macmillan overhauled the Conservatives on progressive and radical lines; after 1951, in government, he served as Minister of Housing, Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He became Prime Minister after the Suez Crisis, and between 1957 and 1963 presided over Great Britain’s transition from the age of austerity to that of affluence. He also proved himself one of the great publishers of his generation.

The culmination of 35 years of research by one of our most respected historians, Supermac gives an unforgettable portrait of a turbulent age. It is a magisterial biography destined to become a classic.

Christopher Hitchens

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Over the last thirty years, Christopher Hitchens has established himself as one of the world’s most influential public intellectuals. His originality, bravery, range, and wit made him first a leading iconoclast of the political left and then, later in his career, a formidable advocate of secular liberalism. When the Twin Towers were attacked in September 2001, Hitchens was re-energised again, quickly emerging as one of the fiercest and most influential advocates of war on Iraq.

In this long-awaited and candid memoir, Hitchens re-traces the footsteps of his life to date, from his childhood in Portsmouth, with his adoring, tragic mother and reserved Naval officer father; to his life in Washington DC, the base from which from he would launch fierce attacks on tyranny of all kinds. Along the way, he recalls the girls, boys and booze; the friendships and the feuds; the grand struggles and lost causes; and the mistakes and misgivings that have characterised his life.

Hitch-22 is, by turns, moving and funny, charming and infuriating, enraging and inspiring. It is an indispensable companion to the life and thought of our pre-eminent political writer.

Christopher Hitchens died on 15 December 2011.

Helen Dunmore

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

Leningrad, 1952. Andrei, a young hospital doctor, and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together in the postwar, postsiege wreckage. But their happiness is precarious, like that of millions of Russians who must avoid the claws of Stalin’s merciless Ministry of State Security. So when Andrei is asked to treat the seriously ill child of a senior secret police officer, he and Anna are fearful. Trapped in an impossible, maybe unwinnable game, can they avoid the whispers and watchful eyes of those who will say or do anything to save themselves?

The Betrayal is a powerful and touching novel of ordinary people in the grip of a terrible and sinister regime, and a moving portrait of a love that will not be extinguished.

Afsaneh Moqadam

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

For much of the world, Iran’s 2009 summer of upheaval was an epic piece of theatre distantly observed. As citizens took to the streets in their millions to protest a stolen election and the regime that made it possible, and later, in smaller numbers, did battle with the shock troops of the Islamic Republic, so the country became effectively off limits for the world’s media. This dramatic confrontation – and the deep divisions that opened among Iran’s rulers as a result – have yet to be convincingly described for a Western audience.

Afsaneh Moqadam observed and took part in the momentous events of that summer. Here, through the eyes of Mohsen, one of Tehran’s young, courageous protesters, Moqadam tells the story of these historic months, from the mass marches that greeted the disputed election results to their brutal suppression by the hated Basij militia – and a dark aftermath of imprisonment, torture and a show trial worthy of Stalinist Russia.

The result is an inspiring account of a confrontation that has signalled the fragility of the Islamic Republic and given pause to those Western leaders, notably President Barack Obama, who must grapple diplomatically with what may become the world’s next nuclear power. Above all, Death to the Dictator! is testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and its ability to strike fear in the hearts of despots.

Oliver Bullough

Posted on March 30, 2011 by - Long lists, Short lists

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.