Category: Short listsTTTT

Lesley Riddoch is one of Scotland’s best known commentators and broadcasters.  She has held many influential positions including assistant editor of The Scotsman and contributing editor of the Sunday Herald.  She is perhaps best known for her broadcasting with programmes on Radio 4, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio Scotland, for which she has won two Sony speech broadcaster awards.

Lesley runs her own independent radio and podcast company, Feisty Ltd, which has produced several series including a weekly topical phone-in programme for BBC Radio Scotland.  She is a weekly columnist for The Scotsman and the Sunday Post and a regular contributor to The Guardian’s Comment is Free.

• Lesley Riddoch’s website
• Lesley Riddoch on Journalisted
• Lesley Riddoch on Twitter

Established as one of the most influential political commentators in the country, Steve Richards became The Independent’s chief political commentator in 2000 having been political editor of the New Statesman. He previously presented GMTV’s flagship current affairs show The Sunday Programme and presents BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

• Steve Richards on Journalisted
• Steve Richards on Twitter

Bronwen Maddox is Chief Foreign Commentator of The Times, in which she writes the World Briefing. From 1996 to 1999, she was the paper’s Washington Bureau Chief and US Editor. Previously, she was at the Financial Times, where she was an investigative reporter.

• Bronwen Maddox’s website
• Bronwen Maddox on Journalisted

Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for The Guardian since 1997. He also writes a monthly column for the Jewish Chronicle, as well as presenting BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View.

He served for four years as The Guardian’s Washington correspondent and has written for a variety of US publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. US affairs remain a keen interest, along with British politics and the Middle East.

He has written two books, Jacob’s Gift (2005) and Bring Home the Revolution: the Case for a British Republic (1998).

• Jonathan Freedland’s website
• Jonathan Freedland on Journalisted
• Jonathan Freedland on Twitter

Oliver Burkeman is a features writer for G2.

• Oliver Burkeman on Journalisted
• Oliver Burkeman on Twitter

Peter Hitchens is a columnist and reporter for the Mail on Sunday, having previously reported from Moscow and Washington for the Daily Express. He has contributed to other publications, such as Prospect and The Guardian, authored documentaries on Channel 4 and the BBC, and appeared elsewhere on radio and television.

Peter has also written a number of books, including The Rage Against God, The Cameron Delusion, The Broken Compass, The Abolition of Britain, The Abolition of Liberty and A Brief History of Crime.

• Winner of the Orwell Prize for Journalism 2010
• Peter Hitchens’ blog
• Peter Hitchens on Journalisted

Jonathan Freedland has been a columnist for The Guardian since 1997. He also writes a monthly column for the Jewish Chronicle, as well as presenting BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series, The Long View.

He served for four years as The Guardian’s Washington correspondent and has written for a variety of US publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Newsweek. US affairs remain a keen interest, along with British politics and the Middle East.

He has written two books, Jacob’s Gift (2005) and Bring Home the Revolution: the Case for a British Republic (1998).

• Jonathan Freedland’s website
• Jonathan Freedland on Journalisted
• Jonathan Freedland on Twitter

Longlisted for work published by the New Statesman.

Martin Bright began his journalistic career writing in very simple English for a magazine aimed at French school children. This experience has informed his style ever since. He worked for the BBC World Service, and The Guardian before joining The Observer as Education Correspondent. He went on to become Home Affairs Editor before becoming the New Statesman’s political editor in 2005. He left the New Statesman in January 2009, and started blogging on Spectator.co.uk. He was appointed political editor of the Jewish Chronicle in August 2009.

• Martin Bright’s blog at Spectator.co.uk
• Martin Bright at New Deal of the Mind
• Martin Bright on Journalisted

John Rentoul is chief political commentator for The Independent on Sunday, and visiting fellow at Queen Mary, University of London, where he teaches contemporary history. Previously he was chief leader writer for The Independent. He has written a biography of Tony Blair, whom he admired more at the end of his time in office than he did at the beginning.

• John Rentoul at Queen Mary, University of London
• John Rentoul’s blog
• John Rentoul on Journalisted

Established as one of the most influential political commentators in the country, Steve Richards became The Independent’s chief political commentator in 2000 having been political editor of the New Statesman. He previously presented GMTV’s flagship current affairs show The Sunday Programme and presents BBC Radio 4’s Week in Westminster.

• Steve Richards on Journalisted
• Steve Richards on Twitter

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

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.

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 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

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

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

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

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