Anthony Seldon's Reading List

"This is a doorstop of a book. It is a definitive biography by Keith Middlemas and John Barnes. It replaced the official biography written by GM Young 17 years before, which came out in 1952. It painted him in a much more sympathetic light and was far more understanding of the importance of his role. They used a wealth of documents and oral history. It was a milestone biography that never perhaps achieved the recognition that it should have done. It brings this extraordinary man to life and puts him in the right place. He restored calm to the nation after World War I, after the uncertainties of postwar economic hardships, and the rise of dictators. Here was the man who piloted the Conservative Party into a direction of democracy and acceptance of its moral responsibility for the whole nation and not just for the well-off in society. He helped school Labour in the ways of parliamentary democracy. He brought calm to the nation at a worrying time. He was the first radio and film prime minister. He popularised the modern role of the prime minister. And he steered the country through, as we saw in the film The King’s Speech , the perilous waters of the abdication [of Edward VIII]."

"I think what is special about this biography is John Grigg himself. He was the son of Edward Grigg, an eminent figure in Britain in World War II, who was in Churchill’s wartime government. John Grigg went on to forsake his own membership of the House of Lords when his father died. He was an important figure himself in politics. He was a prominent critic of the Suez Crisis. He had this real insider’s understanding of politics, which is what makes him such a good biographer. He also wrote very elegantly. He managed to be a great literary biographer. I think the insight into the politics of the period around Lloyd George and the quality of his own writing. He won the Whitbread Award for the second volume and he won the Wolfson Prize for the third. He was this combination of someone who grew up with politics at a very early age in the world of his father and then in his own right. He used all that understanding to write extraordinary biographies in a very polished and fine style. I think it shows his humanity. The closer you get to people the more you realise that simplistic judgments are naive."

"I remember when I was a very young researcher going to interview Martin Gilbert at a house he had in west London and going down to his basement. There were a lot of shelves in this vast basement and every shelf was piled with documents about Churchill’s life. It was the excitement of being with somebody who was so determined to get every single fact right. Yes, and he really had this extraordinary commitment to detail. He interwove oral recollections with documentary evidence and had this painstaking commitment to a reconstruction of Winston Churchill’s life. It speaks of a facet of an historian’s work, which is to understand intimately what is going on in the life of the subject they are studying. And the publication of these immensely detailed diaries and then the companion volumes is a service to history in its study of the greatest prime minister of the last century. And indeed he was honoured for it with a knighthood “for services to British history and international relations”. It is a different kind of history to my first two choices. This is the biggest political biography of the modern era. When I went to Gilbert’s basement it was like going down to the engine room of a ship. It was so exciting to see it all coming together. Any biographer is aware of how random the selection of their material is. We justify that selectivity on all kinds of grounds – the truth is that we are often selective because we don’t have any more time. A library is closing, or it is time to go to bed, or friends are arriving for dinner and we just have to make selections about what episode we are going to talk about and how we are going to write about it. Martin Gilbert is at the other end of the extreme in that he is not deciding what to put in because he is putting everything in. Martin Gilbert’s work is criticised by those who often haven’t read it and he is referred to as somebody who is a chronicler and not a historian. But he has written his one volume, Churchill : A Life , which draws on the work of the biography and the companion books. I think we need all different kinds of biography. We need highly selective biographies, we need iconoclastic biographies. We need bombastic biographies and here is a comprehensive biography. They all have their different roles. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."

"I think that Thorpe is interesting because he was originally a schoolmaster and I am always interested in people who have been working at schools, because to be a schoolteacher is a massive burden and to be in a boarding school is an even greater burden. Anyone who has not worked in them can’t really understand how tremendously time-consuming they are. Here is a quiet historian who works away on his biographies and produces work of meticulous quality. One could fairly say that he could be more detached and more critical but you could say exactly the same of me and my own biographies. I think it is rather refreshing to have biographies that let the reader make up their own mind, rather than pointing heavily to a particular conclusion. Yes, what he gives you is a complete picture. You are left with a very clear image of the humanity of Harold Macmillan and I think that he is a very underrated writer because his books don’t come up with saucy and spicy new details. He isn’t one of these people who try to make their books into vehicles for titillation, and the fact is that most lives don’t deserve that, even if serialisation demands it. He is an Aston Martin DB6 kind of writer, who is very English, very stately."

"John Campbell is a brilliant writer. So much has been written about Thatcher, much of it highly admiring and Campbell has gone into great detail and given us a very clear view of Thatcher which is different from the picture you get from the right-wingers who tend to write about her. It is refreshingly different. Yes, but what Campbell manages to do is be reasoned in his criticism, not just vitriolic and hostile. It is a very nuanced insight into Thatcher. Now, of course, when Thatcher dies we will get the two-volume biography from Charles Moore, which has the superb Daniel Collings as the senior researcher. This is going to have a flood of information in it and it will be immensely exciting when that book comes out. But I think Campbell’s book will still be read about Thatcher in 50 years’ time because he writes extraordinarily well and has a brilliant insight into the minds of prime ministers. I wrote a two-volume biography. In the first book I tried to say that he was made up kaleidoscopically, who, at school or university, most unusually, had not had political interests or particular world views, and who was forged by the imprint of different people and different events on him. So it was a book written around the 20 people who had made him what he was and the 20 events that had made him what he was – this supremely pragmatic, ambitious, power-hungry person whose overarching idea was to reconcile differences and try and triangulate them, to find a certain point between two opposing points of view. This was the pragmatic vision that the modernised Labour Party had. It was much clearer about modernising Labour than having a programme for office. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In volume two I looked at how that came to be a disadvantage. I think it was only towards the end of his premiership that he was able to find his defining policy plans. If he had been able to do that early on it would have been a much more developed programme. I don’t feel I want to change any of that. I am highly critical of him over Iraq. I am sure I will revise some things but the essential judgment that he took a long time to come to his policy and he largely squandered his first term as a result of it, because he wasn’t clear what he wanted to do domestically, remains the same. His clearest policy achievements came in those areas where he was able to use his extraordinary triangulation skills, as we see with the results he got in the Northern Ireland peace agreement."

"The book appeals to me because it is fundamentally about trust, because it says that the presiding fact about the universe is goodness. She is making the case that, whereas there are many reasons not to trust people, we should have an active sense of whether we can trust people or not. We should not have a blind trust, but if we have a presumption of mistrust we will find two things: we will make people mistrusting too and we will find that people are unworthy of our trust. How we treat people, so we find them and so they are. And her book is re-emphasising that underneath all else there is goodness. And she is also talking about the fact that creativity comes when we allow the goodness to flow through us, when we let it come through our pen or through our voice or, if we are a violinist or a pianist, through our fingers. And that this is the prevailing fact of the universe, this sense of harmony, goodness and oneness for which we become the vessel. It is mystical and it is true. Peter Shaffer was making a similar point in Amadeus about Mozart, that he was a vessel, someone who didn’t really even understand fully what was flowing through him. And you either have that mystical sense about the universe or not, but for me in this book Iris Murdoch is saying that it is a much better position to be actively trusting of people. That doesn’t mean that you don’t pay attention as you walk down a dark street at night, and it doesn’t mean to say that you trust everyone you come across. But the prominent colour with which you view the universe should be trust."

"He is saying that we have to trust each other internationally: if you beat a country at war or if you humiliate them as Germany was after the First World War , they will come back at you. If you humiliate any population you will not engender peace, you will engender a resentment that will flare back at you. The only way to have enduring peace is to have the greatest sense of respect for each other. That means that you have to listen and you have to forego the monopoly of your own rightness. If you listen to the Arabs and Israelis talking there is only one thing that they share, and that is that they are both utterly and irrevocably right. This cannot be the case. And this situation is a parable, what is happening there, with this struggle around the most holy site on earth, it is a parable about exactly what this book is talking about. Well, I would say not think again, because thinking is not going to make any difference. I would say it is actually changing the way that you are that makes the difference. He also talks about how with other people, when relationships go wrong at work or at home, it is because we are not respecting each other, we are not listening to each other. The only basis for enduring relationships is to accept each other and within ourselves to accept our own limitations and make peace with ourselves. Getting blind drunk is a way of resolving one’s difficulties and is akin to nations going to war, or beating up your neighbour. Well, where there is hurt one has to make amends, and clarify the grounds for peace. Similarly with family or with friends or with organisations that one has damaged relations with, that continue to trouble one, one will not be free and it will continue to scratch away until one makes amends. As I’m sure you know, Tony Blair quoted the parable of the Good Samaritan as a justification for Kosovo and for Iraq : and if one is asked in by a majority in that country and if one is going to be doing good and helping that country itself stand back on its feet then it’s probably a good thing, but not if one is going in uninvited and if one then stays. So liberal intervention is a good thing if it’s in the interests of the people there … that’s probably how you resolve that one."

"But what is God other than a state of total unknowing? One can’t know God with one’s mind. She quotes George Steiner saying one cannot begin to understand intellectually the impact that music has on oneself. And so with experiences of God: it means absolutely nothing at all, it is of absolutely of no consequence, that Richard Dawkins and the whole crew dismiss God. Because God is not an intellectual experience. But it is a human experience, to do with consciousness, an experience of being, not of having. She talks about the attempts of all the various religions to claim God for their own culture and often for their own gender: God is often phallocentric, and very elitist, and often rather elderly. And that is a grabbing hold of and a claiming of something that is only knowable through complete humility and not through acquiring, but rather letting go. And it is something that is so much at one’s very core that it is a journey to the place where you began, but knowing it for the first time, as T S Eliot said [‘The end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.’ Four Quartets: Little Gidding]."

"O’Neill is an atheist, I think, and she is very Kantian, and she’s a hero because she raised the whole question of trust in a very public way in the Reith lectures in 2002, the year after 9/11. And she posed questions of such fundamental central importance that haven’t been answered seven years later, and it’s because they haven’t been answered that we have then had the credit crunch, we’ve had the decline of trust in politicians, and the year after the lectures we had the Iraq war which is the biggest single cause of loss of trust in government. She is an intellectual pioneer and a hero: by asking fundamental questions and saying that we can’t batter trust into people, we can’t make them trusting by having laws, that trust is related to inner virtue. You are not going to build trust by installing more surveillance cameras or setting more targets, you are just going to make people more subtle and devious about finding ways around those cameras or around those targets. And I think she also has another fundamental truth, which is that the asking of the questions is more important than the answers. You can’t have a checklist of things that one never does as a trusting or trustworthy individual or organisation. It has to be an experiential change within oneself. The free market is not enough for people. Adam Smith himself said that there has to be a moral dimension. Climate change is one of the biggest single examples of the failures of the market, which always operates short-term. Your child, all being well, will now live to the age of 120 or 110 and the market doesn’t provide the answers. There has to be an element of higher values coming in, with structure and respect. The village is a parable for a community where you are known rather than ‘bowling alone’ as Bob Putnam put it [Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital , 1995]. The village could be a cyber village, it could be a very high-tech inner-city community, it could be anywhere where a number of people know and help and support each other. But it is generating more heat than light. Are they talking about it because of their perception of where that extra one per cent of votes lie or do they really believe it? Well, the truth is that marriage is difficult but it is a much better way of bringing up young people – to have a formalised bond and to make vows. Vows are authoritarian. We no longer have vows when we are 13, we have lost the initiation rites into adult life when we symbolically leave the bosom of the family. We need this because we no longer make that vow to humanity as a whole, which is what once happened. Yes, but that was the church or the mosque with a very male-centric interpretation of what marriage is: the vows are about a marriage of equals and caring for each other throughout life. That is not how it has been interpreted by patriarchal religious authorities and by patriarchal faiths and patriarchal legal systems: I don’t see this as going back or forward; I see it as going more deeply into what marriage is."

"There’s just one point I really want to take from this book: he makes it very clear in this book that more trusting people are happier people. The less trust we show, the more we are suspicious of others, the less happy we become. The people who are happier are more trusting, so they have more friends; the less trusting are more isolated because they are more suspicious."