In my Telegraph column today, I disclose four of the books David Cameron is reading on his holiday, and suggest a few more books he might care to read over the Summer...Read the entire column HERE.David Cameron has a voracious appetite for books. He speed-reads his way through several tomes a week.
Some years ago I owned Politico's, a political bookshop in Westminster, and I remember well the huge orders Cameron used to place before each holiday - and this was before he was an MP. It wasn't just geeky political tomes he would request - there was plenty of contemporary fiction too.
This year, I know that as he packed his bags for Cornwall, he took with him some fairly weighty tomes. One was Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos, which traces how the battle against Islamic fundamentalism is being lost in Pakistan. Tucked alongside was Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq by Patrick Cockburn and Britain in Africa by Tom Porteous, an analysis of British foreign policy towards Africa in the Blair years.
But in case you run away with the idea that Cameron is all substance and no style, I am told he has also been reading the new James Bond book, Devil May Care. Make of that what you will.
7 comments:
One too many uses of the word tomes I think but good stuff. On books ... I was just writitng
.I would like to make the additional point, that in the pages of such books as “After Blair “( Kieran O Hara )..” Everytown” by Julian Baggini and the above mentioned new economics( Thaler), intellectual excitement is located for the first ,time neither on the left ,nor on the Libertarian right.
The time of the conservative has come .
And there was me thinking it's silly season...
I have to admit I am impressed - those are first class writers with real knowledge, whose critique is by no means comfortably conservative.
Another Andy Coulson inspired pile of crap... Yawn
Anon. DC is brilliant, so just shut it.
The books that I think every MP should read are:
"Irrationality" by Stuart Sutherland
"A load of Blair" & "Bad thoughts: a guide to clear thinking" both by Jamie Whyte
"Why truth matters" by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom
"The informed heart" by Bruno Bettelheim
"The Great Deception" by Christopher Booker and Richard North
and I'd recommend "The Road to Serfdom" by Friedrich Hayek to every Labour MP
Anon 2.46, I have only ever met or spoken to Andy Coulson three times in my life - at the 2005 party conference, a year ago and at a wedding. But if you wish to imagine I am taking daily instruction from him, be my guest...
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