Tina Brown has edited magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, including Tatler, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. She turned two of them around and made them profitable. She was at the forefront of the digital revolution in journalism at a news aggregator, the Daily Beast. She is also the author of a previous book on the royal family, The Diana Chronicles. The Palace Papers
One afternoon in mid-July 2000, I got a call from Alex Salmond, whose biography I was then working on. An hour or so earlier, to the surprise of pundits and political friends and foes, he had stepped down as leader of the Scottish National Party. He invited me to his office at the Scottish Parliament […]
On becoming a political journalist decades ago, I was handed a plum-coloured booklet explaining that the Lobby, a select group of correspondents with access to the Members’ Lobby in the Palace of Westminster, frequently invited ministers to give information and answer questions. ‘Members are under an obligation to keep secret the fact that such meetings […]
You have to say right away that Steve Richards is very fair to politicians. It is an admirably unfashionable habit among political commentators. Some scribblers nowadays would concoct an affair between David Attenborough and the Queen if either secular saint were to show an inclination to vote Labour. All the same, a writer can go too far. In his ten essays on prime ministers we never had, Richards devotes
For more than two centuries, conservatism has been one of the world’s most influential political philosophies. It has a rich history and is rooted in concepts such as tradition, order, liberty, capitalism and individual freedom. Like most political ideologies, it has witnessed dramatic periods of growth, development and evolution. Yet no two conservatives think exactly […]
The public-spirited citizen may already have heard faint rumblings about Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife, despite her best efforts to avoid publicity. Astonishment and some disapproval have been voiced about both its contents and Lady Swire’s decision to cash in on decidedly private conversations with close friends like Sam and Dave (Swire-speak for […]
Jeremy Corbyn was the least likely party leader in the history of modern politics. Occasionally he is compared to an early Labour leader, George Lansbury, a figure on the left who led his party to electoral doom with a romantic flourish. But Lansbury had served as
Max Beaverbrook was widely disliked during his lifetime as a newspaper owner and backstairs politician who used the Daily Express to further his own interests. Charles Williams’s biography doesn’t make him any more likeable, but it does give a full account of a remarkable 20th-century career. It’s hard not to admire the young Max Aitken’s […]
The economic journalist William Keegan is no mere hack: he has had not only readers in high places, but friends too. His career has taken him from the Financial Times, with interludes at the Daily Mail and the Bank of England, to The Observer, where he has been from 1977 to the present. His work […]
Make a little room on your library shelf for this essential book on American diplomacy. Both memoir and history, it belongs right up there with other works by Acheson and Kennan, Kissinger and Shultz. Bill Burns, who is now president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was for thirty-three years a Foreign Service officer, […]
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A review of my biography of Wittgenstein, and of his newly published last love letters, in the Literary Review: via @Lit_Review
Jane O'Grady - It’s a Wonderful Life
Jane O'Grady: It’s a Wonderful Life - Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes by Anthony Gottlieb;...
literaryreview.co.uk
It was my pleasure to review Stephanie Wambugu’s enjoyably Ferrante-esque debut Lonely Crowds for @Lit_Review’s April issue, out now
Joseph Williams - Friends Disunited
Joseph Williams: Friends Disunited - Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu
literaryreview.co.uk