This week’s bookbencher is Keith Simpson, the Conservative MP for Broadland. He tells us about a book which argues that the Cold War might have been avoided, and of his desire to be Tom Jones — the Fielding variety. Also, he wouldn’t save Shakespeare from the flames, because someone else would.
Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment?
Donna Leon’s novel Wilful Behaviour, which is one of her excellent ‘Commissario Guildo Brunetti’ series set in Venice and Frank Costigliola Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War. His thesis is that FDR, Churchill and Stalin all valued personal relationships and if FDR had lived, maybe the Cold War might not have occurred. Maybe.
Which book would you read to your children?
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure
Island. My dad read it to me and I can still remember being scared of Blind Pew and the Black Spot. Then I read it to my son who loved the Boys Own Adventure and thought Long John Silver
an engaging villain.
Which literary character would you most like to be?
Tom Jones, the hero of Henry Fielding’s wonderfully rumbustious novel. I saw the Tony Richardson film adaption in 1963 and wanted to be the irresponsible young tearaway. It prompted me to read the novel.
Which book do you think best sums up ‘now’?
Anthony Trollope is best known for his political and church novels, but in The Way We Live Now (1875) he addressed what he saw as the prevailing dishonesty of the period brought on by a series of financial scandals. Augustus Melmotte is a plausible crook who becomes the darling of society.
What was the last novel you read?
Before Donna Leon’s novels I was re-reading Raymond Chandler, who, along with Dashiell Hammett, not only wrote some of the best American crime novels but who has had few rivals for a mastery of brilliant dialogue.
Which book would you most recommend?
Max Hastings’ Finest Years: Churchill
as War Lord 1940-45. Hastings is really the doyen of military historians of the Second World War, and although I thought not much more could be added to our understanding of Churchill, in
Finest Years he presents a more nuanced, subtle interpretation, written with brio.
Given enough time, which book would you like to study deeply?
King James Version of the Bible. Not just to go back to Christian beliefs and interpretations, but to see how the wonderful language and cadence influenced generations of writers, clergy and
politicians. Abraham Lincoln’s letters, speeches and oratory owe much to his study of the Bible.
Which books do you plan to read next?
Sir Michael Spicer’s Diaries published next month. A Conservative MP, junior minister under Thatcher, Maastricht rebel and finally Chairman of the 1922 it should prove a good read.
Susan Heuck Allen Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece. We know about British archaeologists and intelligence work (T E Lawrence), but less about their American rivals.
Julia Boyd A Dance With the Dragon: The Vanished World of Peking’s Foreign Colony. I am fascinated by Europeans who lived and worked in pre-communist China.
If the British Library were on fire and you could only save three books, which ones would you take?
Sellar and Yeatman 1066 and All That originally published in 1930 and a lesson to all would be historians.
Frederic Manning’s original limited two volume edition The Middle Parts of Fortune, later republished in an abridged version as Her Privates We. One of the best novels about soldiering and fighting on the Somme during World War One.
Francis Blomefield topographical History of Norfolk originally published in the eighteenth century completed after his death by Charles Parkin. As a Norfolk boy the completed volumes would be a priority to save.
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