Reading List
Anthony Seldon
Contemporary Historian and Educator
Sir Anthony Seldon is a British contemporary historian and educator. He is best known for his books on successive prime ministers, from John Major and Tony Blair through Brown at 10, Cameron at 10, May at 10, Johnson at 10 and Truss at 10. The Impossible Office (2024) is his history of the office of prime minister itself. He has written or edited more than 50 books on contemporary history, politics and education.
He was headmaster of Brighton College, Master of Wellington College and vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, and co-founded the Institute for Contemporary British History and Action for Happiness. He was knighted in 2014 for services to education and modern political history.
Churchill: A Life
by Martin Gilbert
“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.” — via Interview, December 2011
Margaret Thatcher
by John Campbell
“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.” — via Interview, December 2011
Supermac
by DR Thorpe
“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.” — via Interview, December 2011
Lloyd George
by John Grigg
“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.” — via Interview, December 2011
Baldwin
by Keith Middlemas and John Barnes
“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.” — via Interview, December 2011