4 January 2025

This Year’s Reading List (8)

Tag(s): History, Politics & Economics

Once again I wish to begin this year’s series of blogs with my annual recommended reading list based on my reading during 2024. I read some remarkable books and choosing this list has been as difficult as always. I only wrote blogs abut one particular book during the year The Visual Revolution published by my friend Roz Morris who's an expert on broadcasting and other related skills. I actually wrote two blogs based on her book because it was clear that it raised many issues but I don't intend to go into more detail on that as back in August I published these two blogs on Roz’s concept of the visual revolution.

By far and away the most remarkable book I read was Politics on the Edge, a Memoir From Within by Rory Stewart. He has had a career with a huge range of activities both in politics and other areas of public service. Just some of the quotes from famous readers of this book include the famous novelist Sebastian Faulks who said “At last a politician who can write. Opinionated, lucid and thought provoking.” The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan William described it as “An excoriating picture of a shamefully dysfunctional political culture.” the leading playwright Tom Stoppard said “Enthralling, appalling and occasionally hilarious.” Alan Johnson, a leading Labour politician said “It was the most exceptional political memoir I've ever read.” The media personality, the Reverend Richard Coles said “Every page is something beautifully and memorably expressed and something interesting I haven't come across before.”

I've had the pleasure of meeting Rory and he's had an extraordinary and highly varied career. He served in the UK cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development and before that as Prisons Minister, Minister for Africa, Minister for Development, Environment Minister and Chair Defence Committee. He ran against Boris Johnson for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2019, but earlier in his career he was briefly in the British Army before serving as a diplomat in Indonesia, the Balkans and Iraq, establishing and running a charity in Afghanistan and holding a chair at Harvard University. His 21-month 6000 mile walk across Asia including Afghanistan is recorded in his bestseller The Places In Between which I also recommend. He is now the Brady Johnson Professor of the Practise of Grand Strategy at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs, a senior adviser of the nonprofit organisation Give Directly and the Co-host with Alistair Campbell of the UK's leading podcast The Rest is Politics.

It would be too difficult to go into much more detail about his highly varied experiences but Rory is very frank about his work with colleagues in the political arena both offering criticism where it is due and praise where it is also due. The various ministries that he served in listed above only took him about seven years so he had six different jobs in that time and recognised that it was very difficult to really make a difference in such a short space of time. but he did achieve that as Prisons Minister where for the first time in recent history the violence inside prisons was reduced and that was because he very much stuck to his guns about what he wanted while the civil servants around him were trying to deny him that space. The book is so good that I actually read it twice in the course of the year. I will no doubt read it a third time.

Another remarkable book from the legendary investor Ray Dalio Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order - Why Nations Succeed and Fail. Ray is the founder of the world's largest hedge fund and he spent half a century studying global economics and markets. This book examines history's most turbulent economic and political periods to reveal why the times ahead are likely to be radically different from those with experience in our lifetimes but still similar to those that have happened many times before. He has studied the major empires including the Dutch, the British and the American putting into perspective the ‘Big Cycle’ that has driven the successes and failures of all the world's major countries throughout history. He reveals the timeless and universal forces behind these shifts and uses them to look into the future offering practical principles for positioning oneself for what's ahead.

3. Another country that requires understanding is Russia. Orlando Figes has written The Story of Russia. Other well-known historians pay Orlando huge respect; William Dalrymple for example describes Orlando as “a great historian at the peak of his powers” while Anthony Beaver says “if you really want to understand Putin’s Russia today… you simply have to read Figes’ superb account.” No other country has been so divided over its own past as Russia. How the Russians came to tell their story and to reinvent it as they went along is a vital aspect to their history. To understand what Russia's future holds we need to unravel the meanings of that history. Simon Sebag Montefiore who's also written extensively on this part of the world describes it as “a magnificent, magisterial thousand-year history of Russia… by one of the masters of Russian scholarship.“

4. I also read some fascinating books that were less about the human condition, more about the physical surroundings and their impact on us. Blue Machine - How the Ocean Shapes Our World by Helen Czerski describes the massive impact of the Ocean. All of the Earth’s Ocean from the Equator to the Poles is a single engine powered by sunlight hence the Blue Machine. Of course humans like to think of the planet as a green object but it's primarily blue if the sea is reflecting the sunlight as two thirds of the surface is ocean water. The book presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet. This understanding is crucial to our future. Helen Czerski captures the magnitude and subtlety of earth's defining feature showing us a thrilling extent to which we are at the mercy of this great engine.

5. Ed Conway is perhaps better known as a Sky News presenter who focuses on economic trends. But his book Material World takes that learning to a new level as he focuses on six key raw materials: sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium. These fundamental materials have created empires, razed civilisations, and fed our ingenuity and greed for thousands of years. Without them our modern world would not exist. There would be no fibre optic cables, no electric grid, no internet, no mobile phones or electric vehicles. The book won approval from The New York Times, The Economist and The Financial Times all of which rated it at the highest level. But Ed also warns us of impending dangers as we dug more stuff out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every tonne of fossil fuels, we extract six tonnes of other materials, from sand to stone to wood to metal.

6. My next author is someone I have also met. Matthew Syed was the UK’s best table tennis player and has developed a second career as a journalist, writer and consultant. Black Box Thinking is an approach to high performance, a means of finding an edge in a complex and fast changing world. It is not just about sport but has powerful implications for business and politics, as well as for parents and students. In other words, all of us. Drawing on a dizzying array of case studies and real-world examples together with cutting edge research on marginal gains, created in creativity and grit, Matthew Syed tells the inside story of how success really happens - and how we cannot grow unless we are prepared to learn from our mistakes. In commenting on the book one of our most successful entrepreneurs James Dyson said creative breakthroughs always begin with multiple phases. This brilliant book shows how true invention lies in the understanding and overcoming of these failures which we must learn to embrace and of course James Dyson was famous for having thousands of failed models before he hit on his breakthrough design vacuum cleaner.

7. Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia by Gary J. Bass. This is a landmark history of the postwar trials of Japan’s leaders as war criminals, and their impact on the modern history of Asia and the world. In the aftermath of World War II, the victorious Allied powers turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. The Tokyo trial - the largely overlooked counterpart to Nuremberg - was an opportunity both to render judgment on the Allies' vanquished foes and to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was no more than victors’ justice. Judgement at Tokyo is a magnificent, riveting story of wartime action, dramatic courtroom battles, and the epic formative years of postwar Asia.

Again this has had immense critical review appearing in many of the best sellers lists. I had a special interest because my father fought against the Japanese in Burma. After the Bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki he did not get back home until just before Christmas 1945. As an officer he had to wait until all the POWs and the sick and the wounded had returned. My mother never celebrated VE Day as her husband was still fighting the Japanese. When I had the chance to Join Sony, one of the leading Japanese Corporations, I asked my father if he had any objections. He said, “Oh no, that was a long time ago and we must let bygones be bygones.”

8 Fiction. I read the usual suspects: John Grisham of course, David Baldacci, Bernard Cornwell, Colin Dexter, Ken Follett, Jack Higgins, Nick Hornby, David Michell, James Patterson, and Wilbur Smith. But I also came across an unusual book of Sherlock Holmes. I have read all the originals by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and several imitations who never quite match the Master but his creation of the two very special characters of Holmes and Watson, plus the supporting cast of characters like Mrs Hudson and Inspector Lestrade plus the environment of 212B Baker Street and Victorian London leaves plenty of room for additional interpretation. But this book, The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures contains 26 “new stories” each purportedly written by a different author. The editor Mike Ashley has edited over 50 such Mammoth books covering everything from King Arthur to Science Fiction.

4 January 2025

This Year’s Reading List (8)

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