Archives: Legacy book prize entriesTTTT

A journalistic memoir from one of the most recognisable TV news correspondents in the UK. How do you decide what is a ‘story’ and what isn’t? What does a newspaper editor actually do all day? How do hacks get their scoops? How do the TV stations choose their news bulletins? How do you persuade people to say those awful, embarassing things? Who earns what? How do journalists manage to look in the mirror after the way they sometimes behave? The purpose of this insider’s account is to provide an answer to all these questions and more. Andrew Marr’s brilliant, and brilliantly funny, book is a guide to those of us who read newspapers, or who listen to and watch news bulletins but want to know more. Andrew Marr tells the story of modern journalism through his own experience. This is an extremely readable and utterly unique modern social history of British journalism, with all its odd glamour, smashed hopes and future possibility.

Juliet Gardiner’s critically acclaimed book – the first in a generation to tell the people’s story of the Second World War – offers a compelling and comprehensive account of the pervasiveness of war on the Home Front. The book has been commended for its inclusion of many under-described aspects of the Home Front, and alongside familiar stories of food shortages, evacuation and the arrival of the GIs, are stories of Conscientious Objectors, persecuted Italians living in Britain and Lumber Jills working in the New Forest. Drawing on a multitude of sources, many previously unpublished, she tells the story of those six gruelling years in voices from the Orkney Islands to Cornwall, from the Houses of Parliament to the Nottinghamshire mines.

• Juliet Gardiner’s website
• Juliet Gardiner at the Centre for the History of the Book

A profound investigation of the history of anti-Westersn stereotypes that traces them back to the West itself. Twenty -five years ago, Edward Said’s Orientalism described the denigrating mirage of ‘the East’ in the Western colonial mind. But as Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit show in this book, ‘the West’ is the more dangerous mirage of our time, and the idea of us in the minds of our self proclaimed enemies is still largely unexamined and misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in others. ‘Radical Islam’ is generally perceived as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma nad Argalit show that this radicalism owes primary debt to the West. Movement like al-Qaeda are stalked by the same Western bogeymen that have haunted the thoughts of revolutionary groups going back to the early nineteenth century. The same elements of the anti-Western worldview appear again and again: the rootless cosmopolitan living in the Western city; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the centre by a cabal of insiders – often Jews – pulling the hidden levers of power. The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, but in no way is it exclusively Islamic matter. A world of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our understanding of the world in which we live.

• Ian Buruma’s website
• Ian Buruma at the New York Review of Books
• Avishai Margalit at the Institute for Advanced Study
• Avishai Margalit at the New York Review of Books

Still in her teenage years, Nazneen finds herself in an arranged marriage with a disappointed man who is twenty years older. Away from the mud and heat of her Bangladeshi village, home is now a cramped flat in a high-rise block in London’s East End. Nazneen knows not a word of English, and is forced to depend on her husband. But unlike him she is practical and wise, and befriends a fellow Asian girl Razia, who helps her understand the strange ways of her adopted new British home. Nazneen keeps in touch with her sister Hasina back in the village. But the rebellious Hasina has kicked against cultural tradition and run off in a ‘love marriage’ with the man of her dreams. When he suddenly turns violent, she is forced into the degrading job of garment girl in a cloth factory. Confined in her flat by tradition and family duty, Nazneen also sews furiously for a living, shut away with her buttons and linings – until the radical Karim steps unexpectedly into her life. On a background of racial conflict and tension, they embark on a love affair that forces Nazneen finally to take control of her fate. Strikingly imagined, gracious and funny, this novel is at once epic and intimate. Exploring the role of Fate in our lives – those who accept it; those who defy it – it traces the extraordinary transformation of an Asian girl, from cautious and shy to bold and dignified woman.

The first volume of John Campbell’s biography of Margaret Thatcher was described by Frank Johnson in the Daily Telegraph as ‘much the best book yet written about Lady Thatcher’. That volume, The Grocer’s Daughter, described Mrs Thatcher’s childhood and early career up until the 1979 General Election which carried her into Downing Street. This second volume covers the whole eleven and a half years of her momentous premiership. Thirteen years after her removal from power, this is the first comprehensive and fully researched study of the Thatcher Government from its hesitant beginning to its dramatic end. Campbell draws on the mass of memoirs and diaries of Mrs Thatcher’s colleagues, aides, advisers and rivals, as well as on original material from the Ronald Reagan archive, shedding fascinating new light on the Reagan-Thatcher ‘special relationship’, and on dozens of interviews. The Iron Lady will confirm John Campbell’s Margaret Thatcher as one of the greatest political biographies of recent times.

The story of the Warsaw Rising from the the leading British authority on the history of Poland. Rising ’44 is a brilliant narrative account of one of the most dramatic episodes in 20th century history, drawing on Davies’ unique understanding of the issues and characters involved. In August 1944 Warsaw offered the Wehrmacht the last line of defence against the Red Army’s march from Moscow to Berlin. When the Red Army reached the river Vistula, the people of Warsaw believed that liberation had come. The Resistance took to the streets in celebration, but the Soviets remained where they were, allowing the Wehrmacht time to regroup and Hitler to order that the city of Warsaw be razed to the ground. For 63 days the Resistance fought on in the cellars and the sewers. Defenceless citizens were slaughtered in their tens of thousands. One by one the City’s monuments were reduced to rubble, watched by Soviet troops on the other bank of the river. The Allies expressed regret but decided that there was nothing to be done, Poland would not be allowed to be governed by Poles. The sacrifice was in vain and the Soviet tanks rolled in to the flattened city. It is a hugely dramatic story, vividly and authoritatively told by one of our greatest historians.

• NormanDavies.com

Supping with the Devils is the first collection of Hugo Young’s journalism. In it, he interprets the major events that have punctuated British political life, but it also considers subjects as diverse as the nature and future of the British state; the crisis of religious belief; and Britain’s place in the world. Urgent, penetrating and always original, these articles – taken from The Guardian, New Yorker and London Review of Books, among others – constitute a brilliant chronicle of a transformative period in British history.

• Winner of a Special Orwell Prize 2004
• Guardian tribute to Hugo Young, 1938-2003

Neal Ascherson is one of Britain’s finest writers in an undefinable genre that fuses history, memoir, politics and meditations on places. His books on Poland and his collected essays on the strange Britain to which he returned from Europe in the mid 1980s were deeply influential. In 1995, Black Sea won critical praise in many languages and several literary prizes. Stone Voices is Ascherson’s return to his native Scotland. It is an exploration of Scottish identity, but this is no journalistic rumination on the future of that small nation. Ascherson instead weaves together a story of deep time – the time of geology and archaeology, of myth and legend – with the story of modern Scotland and its rebirth. Few writers in these islands have his ability to write so well about the natural context of history.

• Winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 1994
• Neal Ascherson at the London Review of Books
• Neal Ascherson on Journalisted

For the last fifty years, the German Occupation of France has been regarded as a period characterised by four things: cold, hunger, the absence of freedom and above all fear; a time when the indigenous population was cruelly and consistently oppressed by the army of occupation. The people of France were either bold members of the Resistance or craven collaborators. In this riveting and provocative study, Robert Gildea reveals a rather different story, a story which shows that the truth lies – as so often – somewhere in between. The winner of the Wolfson History Prize 2002.

• Robert Gildea at the University of Oxford

A frank autobiography by Times columnist and ex-politician Matthew Parris. His childhood was spent on a variety of different countries as his engineer father moved jobs; Rhodesia, Cyprus, the Middle East and Jamaica. After Cambridge and Yale, he joined the Conservative central office at roughly the same time (aged 26) he discovered he was gay. He worked for Michael Dobbs, Chris Patten, and Mrs Thatcher (who famously fired him), before entering parliament himself. Part participant, part bystander, Matthew Parris describes what it was like to be so close to the centre and remain an outsider.

• Winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2005
• Matthew Parris on Journalisted

Encircling London like a noose, the M25 is a road to nowhere, but when Iain Sinclair sets out to walk this asphalt loop- keeping within the ‘acoustic footprints’- he is determined to find out where the journey will lead him. Stumbling upon converted asylums, industrial and retail parks, ring-fenced government institutions and lost villages, Sinclair discovers a Britain of the fringes, a landscape consumed by developers. London Orbital charts this extraordinary trek and round trip of the soul, revealing the country as you’ve never seen it before.

• Iain Sinclair’s Official Unofficial Website

A brilliant cultural, political and social history of British national identity from our ‘finest hour’ in the dark days of 1940 to the Millennium celebrations of Blair’s Britain. Who are the British today? For nearly three hundred years British national identity was a unifying force in times of glory and despair. It has now virtually disappeared. In Patriots, Richard Weight explores the decline of Britishness and the rise of powerful new identities in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Based on a wealth of original research, it is scholarly in depth and scope, yet never departs from a thoroughly readable and entertaining style.

In this bold, provocative and extremely funny book Roy Foster demolishes the clichés that surround Ireland’s past, examining how key moments from its history have been turned into myths – and, more recently, airbrushed and repackaged for Hollywood and popular culture. Whether discussing the ‘misery tourism’ of Famine theme parks, ideas of mystical Celticism, the contested ‘Irishness’ of Yeats or the sentimentalized childhoods of Angela’s Ashes and Gerry Adams’s memoir, The Irish Story brilliantly separates the tall tales from the truth.

• Roy Foster at Hertford College, University of Oxford