Keith Simpson MP's Recess Reading List

Each recess, Shadow Foreign Office Minister Keith Simpson MP circulates a recommended reading list for his parliamentary colleagues. These are his current book highlights.

For those colleagues who need to complement campaigning for Boris Johnson in the London mayoral election with stretching the little grey cells, there has been an interesting selection of books published recently.

Jonathan Powell, brother of Charles and former Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Blair has written, Great Hatred, Little Room Making Peace in Northern Ireland (2008). This describes the crucial role he played as an interlocutour with Sinn Fein and the IRA and is revealing about leading political figures. Sadly, his diaries remain unpublished.

David Owen has written In Sickness and In Power Illness in Heads of Government During the Last 100 Years (2008). Not a new theme and already touched upon by the doctor in a thin volume published last year The Hubris Syndrome Bush, Blair and the Intoxication of Power.

Sadly, Menzies Campbell’s memoirs Menzies Campbell My Autobiography (2008) are a disappointment. Worthy, but dull, and spiced up one suspects with sections on Charles Kennedy to meet the requirements of a tabloid serialisation.

There is an excellent tradition of MPs and Peers writing books on political, historical and cultural matters as well as fiction. John Hutton, currently Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, has found time in a heavy schedule to carry out a labour of literary love. Kitchener’s Men The King’s Own Royal Lancasters on the Western Front 1915 – 1918 (2008) is a moving history of the service of the Kitchener army battalions of this regiment who served on the Western Front. Mainly recruited from the Furness area of the northwest, covering John Hutton’s constituency, this book is an account of the raising, training and fighting experience of civilians who became temporary soldiers.

Bill Deedes was a national treasure and like a good wine matured with age. He wrote his autobiography several years ago and now we have Stephen Robinson’s biography The Remarkable Lives of Bill Deedes (2008). More revealing than Bill Deedes own writing he suggests that his formal ministerial and editorial careers were something of a disappointment. His experiences as an infantry officer in the Second World War defined his later life.

Timothy Heppell, a young academic has written Choosing the Tory Leader Conservative Party Leadership Elections from Heath to Cameron (2008). He argues that the Conservatives have been maladroit when constructing their electoral procedures and after Margaret Thatcher returned unexpected candidates. He concludes that the undisputed mandate and ideological pragmatism of David Cameron indicates that the Conservatives have learnt from past mistakes.

Globalisation and economic instability are very much on our minds at present. Nick Robins has written a thought provoking study of the East India Company which examines its corporate behaviour in The Corporation That changed the World How the East India Company Shaped the Modern Multinational (2006).

The Great Crash of 1929 and the depression have been the stuff of many recent editorials and a good analysis can be found in Maury Klein Rainbow’s End The Crash of 1929 (2001) Circumstances and institutions are different but a credit bubble and collapse are not.

The American academic Gertrude Himmelfarb has written numerous books extolling the virtues of the nineteenth century mindset, with its emphasis in character, sympathy and social cohesion. Himmelfarb is much admired by Gordon Brown who has written an introduction to the first British edition of her 2004 study The Roads to Modernity The British, French and American Enlightenments (2008). Reading the book and the introduction one is left to wonder whether the Prime Minister ever grasped Himmelfarb’s conclusions?

Following the collapse of communism in Europe and then the defeat of Saddam Hussein much speculation was given to whether the US would bring forward a new Marshall Plan. Greg Behrman has written the first study of the Marshall Plan in twenty years in The Most Noble Adventure The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Post War Europe (2008).

In What Does China Think? (2008) Mark Leonard goes beyond the usual analysis of economics, politics and military power to consider China’s intellectual debates and the ideological competition the Chinese might pose to European and American World news.

Russia under Putin has created new challenges for the Europeans and the Americans which Edward Lucas considers in The New Cold War (2008). He is definitely on the side of those who see a more aggressive, nationalistic and threatening Russia.

A useful volume of essays on challenges in foreign and security policy, global warming and energy can be found in The World Crisis The Way Forward After Iraq (2008) edited by Robert Harvey. Contributors include Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Geoffrey Howe, David Howell and Michael Heseltine.

The Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello had a high flying career as a UN diplomat who was killed in the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad. It could be said that on all the big international crises he got it wrong – the Balkans, Afghanistan and East Timor. His career is a salutary reminder of the limitations of the UN staffers. In Chasing the Flame Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World (2008) Samantha Power attempts to present him as a UN hero. The author was foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama until she was sacked a few weeks ago for calling Hillary Clinton “a monster”.

Adam Zamoyski is a prolific historian with to his credit 1812 Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow and Rites of Peace The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna. Now in Warsaw 1920 Lenin’s Failed Conquest of Europe, he tells the dramatic story of the Soviet attempt to bring revolution to Germany and Austria. Unfortunately Poland was in the way, and it could be argued that for the second time in Europe’s history – the first being the defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 – the Poles “saved Europe”. An incompetent, brutal but important campaign with a glittering cast of characters including Stalin and Charles de Gaulle.

Vichy France is not one of our Gallic neighbour’s finest hours. A period of collaboration, ambivalence but also resistance. Simon Kitson has written a superb little study The Hunt for Nazi Spies Fighting Espionage in Vichy France (2007). Based on original sources he demonstrates that Vichy’s intelligence and security services were determined to defend the state’s neutrality against German spies. At times they tipped off Free French and Allied agents who were vulnerable to German penetration.

Countless books have been written on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. The distinguished American academic Saul Friedlander wrote The Years of Persecution Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933 – 1939 in 1997. Now his magisterial second volume The Years of Extermination Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939 – 1945 has been published. Friedlander manages to combine narrative with analysis and to move seamlessly from the motives and actions of Hitler and Himmler to the diaries of ordinary perpetrators and victims.

Forty years ago when MRD Foot wrote the official history of SOE in France it caused an uproar and threatened law suits. Whitehall had always been coy about SOE but recently almost totally relaxed and a series of sponsored and independently written volumes have been published country by country. Roderick Bailey’s The Wildest Province SOE in the Land of the Eagle (2008) is about Albania. This is an excellent account of a little known episode in the Second World War in a country that in peacetime resembled a depth of savagery that can barely be imagined. Bailey handles with sensitivity the dilemma facing the British – replicated in Yugoslavia and Greece – of whether to support the communist or nationalist partisans.

Those of us who have been fortunate enough to visit Syria have been struck by the depth of historical culture and archaeology. The conflict between Rome and the Parthian and Persian Empires is all too often marginalised in our fixation with Britain and the Mediterranean. Peter M Edwell’s Between Rome and Persia The Middle Euphrates, Mesopotamia and Palmyra under Roman control (2008) brings together recent scholarship even if at an outrageous academic price.

Another superior work of scholarship at an equally outrageous price is James Onley The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj Merchants, Rulers and the British in the nineteenth century Gulf (2008). Onley shows that Britain’s informal empire in the Gulf relied upon an extensive network of local elites and native agents for political influence, commerce and intelligence. Interesting reading bearing in mind current debates on direct and indirect influence.

T E Lawrence and the Arab Revolt is the subject of a voluminous literature. Now we have a fresh, original analysis with a new interpretation. Molly A Mohs Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt The first modern intelligence war (2007) is yet another outrageously priced academic book. Through meticulous research Mohs documents the crucial importance of signal intelligence, human intelligence and image intelligence (photo recce) for T E Lawrence and other British intelligence officers. Front and centre she places the Arab Bureau in Cairo which combined the attributes of Bletchley Park and SOE in the Second World War. The members of the Arab Bureau helped to plan, support and direct help for the Arab Revolt.

The wonderful old traveller, Arabist and muscular aesthetic Wilfred Thesiger wrote a series of brilliant studies of nomadic life. Penguin Classics have just republished his Arabian Sands first published in 1959, with a new introduction by Rory Stewart, who in some respects follows in Thesiger’s footsteps. Almost a lost world and yet only sixty years ago.

Books analysing the war in Iraq and the post conflict period came thick and fast. Jonathan Steele from the Guardian has written Defeat Why They Lost Iraq (2007) which takes as his theme “mission impossible” because the coalition could never have succeeded even if they had prepared extensively for a post conflict situation. He argues we underestimated Iraqi national feeling and resentment.

Hilary Synnott was on the point of retiring in 2003 from a distinguished career in the Foreign Office when he was asked to go and be the Coalition Authority’s representative in Southern Iraq. In Bad Days in Basra My Turbulent Time as Britain’s Man in Southern Iraq (2008) he has written a shrewd account of his time in Basra and has pertinent observations about operating in coalitions and achieving objectives working with the military. A must for the “lessons learnt” inquiry on Iraq.

Michael Burleigh’s academic career was based on research and writing about Nazi Germany before moving into the history of politics and religion. His Blood and Rage A Cultural History of Terrorism (2008) is a provocative history of terrorism which argues that it can only be effectively controlled by avoiding mistakes from the past, and that divisions and weaknesses within terrorist organisations can be exploited.

Finally, a “golden oldie”. Just into the New Year the writer, journalist and raconteur George MacDonald Fraser died. Better known for his wonderfully politically incorrect Flashman novels, the author of the screen play of Octupussy, and a seriously good study of the sixteenth century Border Reivers, The Steel Bonnets. In 1992 he wrote an account of his experiences as a young private soldier serving in a battalion of the Border Regiment in the Burma Campaign in 1945. Quartered Safe Out Here is still available in paperback and is a moving and at times very funny account of soldering and fighting under appalling conditions against a vicious enemy seen from the perspective of an infantry section. The Cumbrian accents and repartee are a joy to read and there is hardly an officer in sight.