Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1995-03-13
Dewey code: 320
Price: £16.99
Review The Downing Street Years / HarperCollins Publishers Ltd:
Authors
- Pamela Mountbatten and India Hicks
Dewey code: 954.0359092
RRP: £14.99
Price: £7.59
Review INDIA REMEMBERED: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power / Pavilion:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2002-09-05
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.67
Review Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5 / Arrow Books Ltd:You have to admire the cheek of Open Secret's author Stella Rimington. After a career spanning 25 years in MI5, during which she was more than happy for the Official Secrets Acts to be used to the government's advantage, she is now outraged that attempts should have been made to block publication of her memoirs and is calling for the act to be reformed. In an extended preface to Open Secret, Rimington writes of her encounter with Cabinet secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, "By the end of an hour or so of being threatened, bullied and cajoled in the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger way the Establishment behaves to its recalcitrant sons and, as I now know, daughters, I was very shaken". One wonders what else she expected? The thought of any former director-general of MI5 writing his or her memoirs was bound to have disturbed the security services and, compared to many, Rimington got off lightly. But then, whatever else she might think, Rimington is still very much an Establishment woman. She submitted her manuscript for vetting, took out one or two edgy bits, and as she disarmingly points out, there are no revelations about the inner workings of the intelligence services. When she gets to any contentious issues, such as MI5's role in infiltrating CND and breaking the miners' strike, all she has to say is that MI5 never did anything wrong, that that those who say otherwise are conspiracy theorists and that we'll just have to take her word for it because she's right. The portrait that emerges of a bunch of mildly incompetent bureaucrats who wouldn't say boo to a goose does no favours to Rimington or MI5. The books does have its moments, particularly those describing a woman isolated in an almost exclusively male world, but its real significance lies in the fact it was published at all. If the director-general is allowed to go public, there's precious little to stop the MI5 foot soldiers doing likewise. [+]And when they do, the skeletons that Rimington has kept firmly locked in the cupboard might start to come tumbling out. -John Crace.
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2008-01-07
Dewey code: 954.9105092
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.99
Review Daughter of the East: An Autobiography / Pocket Books:
Creator: Barbara Vedder
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 1992-11-26
Dewey code: 891.8537
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.32
Review This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) / Penguin Classics:
Publication date: 2008-05-08
Dewey code: 352.236
RRP: £11.99
Price: £5.70
Review The Powers to Lead: Soft, Hard, and Smart / OUP USA:
Publication date: 2007-11-01
RRP: £11.99
Price: £6.81
Review Margaret Thatcher: Iron Lady v. 2 / Vintage:Love her or hate her, there is no escaping the impact that Margaret Thatcher has made upon post-war British Politics. The 1980s are indelibly marked as the Thatcher years, and her rise from Grantham grocer's daughter to Finchley MP in 1959, Leader of the Conservative Party by 1975, and Prime Minister by 1979 was as tenacious as it was controversial. Since being ousted from power, biographers have been busy reassessing her legacy. By far the most distinguished account to date is John Campbell's Margaret Thatcher. Volume One: The Grocer's Daughter. Campbell's credentials for the job are impeccable, having already written the acclaimed biography of Thatcher's great rival, Edward Heath, winner of the 1994 NCR Book Award. As he explains from the outset, this is not an authorised biography, but Thatcher's office made no attempt to prevent the reconstruction of Thatcher's life from her birth in Grantham to her entry into Downing Street. This is a blessing, as Campbell's immensely readable and even-handed book challenges the idealised myth of Thatcher's early life and indoctrination into the "Victorian values" of her Methodist father Alderman Roberts. According to Campbell, Thatcher reinvented herself as a wealthy Home Counties lady, through her difficult years at Oxford, marriage to Denis, and sexist responses from her party throughout her early years in Opposition. However, as her status as a "conviction politician" grew, and with the General Election of 1979 looming, she radically changed her image: "In place of the Home Counties Tory lady in a stripy hat, married to a rich husband, whose children had attended the most expensive private schools, she forced the media to redefine her as a battling meritocrat who had raised herself by hard work from a humble provincial background. [+]" Campbell's story is always compelling, his research meticulous, and his sweep of the political skulduggery of the 60s and 70s masterful. Margaret Thatcher is an absorbing story of the creation of a modern political myth. -Jerry Brotton.
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2002-09-16
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £9.10
Price: £3.53
Review Robert Kennedy / Simon & Schuster:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2004-07-01
Dewey code: 973
RRP: £10.99
Price: £1.01
Review John F Kennedy: An Unfinished Life / Penguin Books Ltd:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2002-09-06
Dewey code: 324
RRP: £9.99
Price: £3.99
Review Gladstone / Pan Books:
Edition: 1st St. Martin's Griffin Ed
Publication date: 2006-04-06
Dewey code: 951.930430922
RRP: £12.99
Price: £3.26
Review Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty / Griffin Trade Paperbacks:
Publication date: 2008-05-30
Dewey code: 967.571043
RRP: £13.99
Price: £8.43
Review A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It / John Wiley & Sons:
Publication date: 2007-03-19
Dewey code: 973.04960730092
RRP: £6.95
Price: £2.26
Review Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama / Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers Inc:
Authors
- J. Arch Getty
- Oleg V. Naumov
Dewey code: 947.0842092
RRP: £25.00
Price: £12.92
Review Stalin's 'Iron Fist': The Times and Life of N. I. Yezhov (Portraits of Revolution) / Yale University Press:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2001-09-06
Dewey code: 324
RRP: £14.99
Price: £8.76
Review The Prime Minister: The Job and Its Holders Since 1945 / Penguin Books Ltd:Peter Hennessy, former journalist turned scholar of contemporary political history, is an academic aeolus whose infectious enthusiasm for his subject, Whitehall and Westminster, blows the dust off documents and reinflates a mandarin's minute with a telling topicality. The holder of the Chair of Contemporary History at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London, he has natural gift (and inclination) for grafting germane gossip onto the gravity of his subject and thus enlivening his expert exhumation of archives with appropriate anecdote. His earlier work, Whitehall has become a classic, and in his latest study he turns his attention to the steady accretion of power by Prime Ministers since the last world war and makes an assessment of each occupant of 10 Downing Street. Hennessy delights in proceeding by exposure as well as explication, throwing up fascinating insights on Premiers as they arrive at crucial decisions. He is undoubtedly happiest when chronicling the manoeuvrings of the backroom boys in Whitehall rather than those in the corridors of the Palace of Westminster, but then the shift of power away from the legislature to the executive is becoming all too apparent. In each of his studies, Hennessy shows how individual Prime Ministers struggled and shaped the governance of the nation to their different personalities, and then their day of hard graft and glory is gone. As Harold Macmillan, one of the more charismatic holders of the office, said after his resignation, "nothing rolls up more quickly than a red carpet" -Michael Hatfield.
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2002-10-30
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £12.99
Price: £7.00
Review My Early Life / Eland Publishing Ltd:
Publication date: 2000-07-11
Dewey code: 940
RRP: £10.95
Price: £8.15
Review Stalinist Russia (Heinemann Advanced History) / Heinemann Educational Publishers:
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2007-04
Dewey code: 956.704431
RRP: £8.38
Price: £1.76
Review The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq / Harvest Books:
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2007-05-01
Dewey code: 320
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.25
Review The Progressive Patriot / Black Swan:
Publication date: 2007-10-04
RRP: £20.00
Price: £10.00
Review More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007 / Hutchinson:
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The Downing Street Years, INDIA REMEMBERED: A Personal Account of the Mountbattens During the Transfer of Power, Open Secret: The Autobiography of the Former Director-General of MI5, Daughter of the East: An Autobiography, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics), The Powers to Lead: Soft, Hard, and Smart, Margaret Thatcher: Iron Lady v. 2, Robert Kennedy, John F Kennedy: An Unfinished Life, Gladstone, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, A Thousand Hills: Rwanda's Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, Hopes and Dreams: The Story of Barack Obama, Stalin's 'Iron Fist': The Times and Life of N. I. Yezhov (Portraits of Revolution), The Prime Minister: The Job and Its Holders Since 1945, My Early Life, Stalinist Russia (Heinemann Advanced History), The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq, The Progressive Patriot, More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007 |
