Chris Upton picks his favourite books of the year with an eye to the past.
What could be better to open on Christmas Day (the only time I’ll mention it, I promise) than a new book? Bury yourself in that, ignore the TV and the family and the carol singers, and have a really nice day.
And should you elect to do so, I’ve got a Christmas hamper (sorry, I said it again) of local history books for you to choose from. I’ve being doing this for so many years in the Post that it’s almost as traditional as Good King Wenceslas.
The first book is for those with really deep pockets. It’s from an academic publisher and therefore, for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, well beyond the purchasing power of the average bookshop visitor.
Travis L. Crosby’s Joseph Chamberlain: A Most Radical Imperialist (I. B. Tauris, London), is a biography of the great Birmingham politician, and an attempt to get under the skin of this most enigmatic of men.
You can probably guess from his name that the author is an American. At £59.50, this is clearly not a book for the faint-hearted, and I was rather disappointed to see Joe’s career as Birmingham councillor and mayor dealt with in the first three pages.
Crosby is much more interested in Chamberlain’s later years, and his emergence (indicated in the title) as one of the leading proponents of Empire. But at a time when a Coalition of Liberals and Conservatives is running our country, there could hardly be a more topical biography than that of the first Liberal-Unionist.
Bill Cash’s biography John Bright: Statesman, Orator, Agitator, is also published by Tauris, but at a far more reasonable £25. The volume is released to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the Liberal politician’s birth.
Together Bright and Chamberlain represented Birmingham in the House of Commons for more than 70 years, a period that stretches from the mid-1850s to the outbreak of the First World War.
Bright emerges as a much more attractive and personable individual than his erstwhile colleague and, in his opposition to the Crimean War, one with more contemporary resonance as well.
Cash helps to bring home the thrill of Bright’s oratory and stagecraft – something of a lost art today – and the huge esteem in which he was once held. Some 20,000 supporters who squeezed into Bingley Hall can’t be wrong.
I found this a very readable account of a seminal 19th-century figure, and one who stuck to his radical roots throughout the whole of his long career. Cash’s sympathetic portrayal is heart-felt, and a reminder that there is more to politics than the party machine.
If biographies of Messrs Chamberlain and Bright are well-timed, so too is Alan Crawley’s John Madin, RIBA (London, £20), part of a RIBA series on 20th-century British architects.
