On Leadership by Tony Blair
A French novelist, on receiving a letter from a person of title, remarked that the “style was that of a shopping list.” He might have been talking about Sir Tony Blair. Blair may have been one of the most gifted politicians and notorious war criminals of his generation, but unlike, say, Henry Kissinger (an obvious influence here), he can barely write a paragraph which is not staccato and telegrammatic. Here is his first attempt: “No Leader [his capitals] I ever met, who succeeded, did so just by being a leader. They did it by hard work… And by curiosity. By a willingness to learn. By a relentless pursuit of the right answer.”
In this new textbook of inside tips on the mechanics of being a leader, Blair posits that there are three stages of leadership through which all Leaders must pass. In the first, Leaders know nothing about the art of governing and lap up all the advice they can find. In the second stage, Leaders think they have gained enough experience to know everything when, in fact, they know nothing. In the third, Leaders accept the smallness of their range of experience and once more become willing to listen and learn.
Certainly, there are insights to be gained from a man who ran the country for ten years and has been on first-name terms with the most powerful people on the planet. Blair’s observations are pithy, intelligent, memorable, and universally applicable to the study of leadership. On the other hand, he is disturbingly enthusiastic about Elon Musk, technocracy, and AI. On the subject of big business his advice is candidly to cut taxes and deregulate. When reflecting on his own legacy, he mentions “understandable disagreement and anger” about the bloody cataclysm of the Iraq War, but is keen to pad out the rest of the page with a list of his achievements in domestic policy.
Don’t purchase this book – otherwise Blair will receive the royalties, and he makes more than enough from his advice sessions with foreign dictators and his £35 million property empire – but if you can find a copy in a library, it is a unique and valuable read.
Precipice by Robert Harris
H.G. Wells’s Mr Brittling Sees It Through – at one time the most popular novel in the world – contains the first great fictional account of Britain in the summer of 1914, when the sunny complacencies of nineteenth-century civilisation were engulfed by total war. Robert Harris’s Precipice contains the latest. A historical novel, it is the true story of then-prime minister H.H. Asquith and his affair with Venetia Stanley, a twenty-six-year-old aristocrat.
The character of Asquith is compelling if slightly incomplete. He would write to Venetia several times a day, and by regular post would send her some of the most dangerous state secrets. In his letters (which are real) obsessive rhapsodies are melted in with the official secrets of a Whitehall on the cusp of war. Admittedly, Harris’s reliance on these primary documents for Asquith leaves some questions unanswered; the prime minister’s motivations are underdeveloped, because the author is not concerned with explaining so much as with depicting his passion. Venetia is more impressively realised. In her case, there are no letters to draw on (in real life, Asquith destroyed all her epistles), and so there is more effort to unpack her motivations. “I feel it’s almost my patriotic duty to keep him happy,” she says of Asquith. She emerges as a dynamic, burning, tragic heroine – possibly the greatest character of Harris’s corpus.
Harris never neglects the plot, which is rapid, engrossing, and marvellously constructed. The book is a page-turner with real literary craft behind it, clearly and economically written. Atmosphere and setting are vividly evoked from the very first paragraph onwards: “Late one Thursday morning at the beginning of July 1915, a young woman with dark wet hair strode long-legged from the serpentine in Hyde Park along Oxford Street towards Marylebone. In one hand she carried a cream linen sun hat, in the other a damp bathing costume and a pair of silk stockings rolled up inside a navy-blue towel.” If you only read one historical novel this year, make it this one.
Lessons in Crime: Academic Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards
The British Library Crime Classics series, now well past its hundredth book, derives a part of its appeal from the fact that the forgotten writings of an era give a much more vivid insight into it than those which survive for posterity. All the books in the series are immersive in their period charm. Lessons in Crime is an anthology of short, well-plotted, and superbly entertaining mystery stories, mostly from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, all set in the world of academia.
The best of them are set in Oxford. In “The Missing Undergraduate” an Oxonian policeman investigates the disappearance from St Peter’s of the son of a Tory MP. In the snappily suspenseful “The Gilded Pupil”, an Oxford graduate gets a post as a millionaire’s governess and becomes embroiled in a dangerous kidnapping plot. In “Murder at Pentecost”, a travelling salesman (ill-fatedly named Mr Montague Egg) visits Oxford and is able, by virtue of being the only outsider, to solve the murder of a Master; this story is by Dorothy L. Sayers, who was the daughter of the chaplain of Christ Church, and who would go on to write possibly the best Oxford crime novel, Gaudy Night. An original Sherlock Holmes adventure is included, as well as a story about A.J. Raffles, the once-famous cricketer and gentleman thief, although it is not Raffles’s best outing.
There are fifteen stories in all, making the book good value for money, and, as ever, there is an engaging and informative introduction by series consultant Martin Edwards.
