Francis Wheen
Fictive Propaganda
War Without Frontiers
By Andrew Osmond
Hodder & Stoughton 598 pp £8.95 order from our bookshop
A Very British Coup
By Chris Mullin
Hodder & Stoughton 220pp £6.95 order from our bookshop
The political thriller has been perhaps the most successful fictional genre of the past decade, as Frederick Forsyth’s bank manager would doubtless testify. Yet very few politicians have tried their hands at it. A few years ago Brian Sedgemore, who was then still a Labour MP, wrote an indescribably bad book called Mr Secretary of State. But that hardly counted as a thriller; it read more like a copy of the Labour manifesto with a few love scenes hamfistedly chucked into it.
The one politician who has produced readable and successful thrillers is Douglas Hurd. He is now a minister in Mrs Thatcher’s government and he was, by the by, the only Foreign Office minister not to resign when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. War Without Frontiers is, one gathers, the last
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas
Delighted to make my debut in @Lit_Review with a review of Philip Short's heavyweight new bio, Putin: His Life and Times
(Yes, it's behind a paywall, but newspapers and magazines need to earn money too...)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vlad-the-invader
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying