Bloody Stephen Bush
Or, the speakers you most want to see at Backstory
Our picks this week
Order these books, and hundreds more, from Backstory:
Things Can Only Get Bitter: All In It Together: England in the Early 21st Century by Alwyn Turner. Just out in paperback this week. I love Turner's social histories: from high culture to low, the corridors of power to the pop charts, he weaves together a colourful and compelling narrative of the recent past. It’s all here, from (Margaret) Beckett to Brexit, gay marriage to Gillian Duffy. - Tom
Very naughty boys: Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. While Pride Month usually celebrates LGBTQ heroes, this book makes forensic study of history's villainous, cruel, complex and misunderstood queers, and smartly explores their influence on how we all understand sexual identity and its place in the world around us. - Tara
Yesterday’s stall bestsellers
1. The Guardian!!
2. Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney. Just out in paperback
3. The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business by Wright Thompson. It’s the best feeling when a book you love also sells well… I’m really not very fussed about sport but Wright makes me care. He’s a master of The Art of Hanging Out - he spends months at a time on these extraordinary profiles of extraordinary people.
4. Can’t We Just Print More Money? Economics in Ten Simple Questions by Rupal Patel and Jack Meaning. The Bank of England’s first-ever book has been a consistent top-seller
5. Edgar and the Sausage Inspector by Jan Fearnley. I mean, why not?
Events are on my mind this week. Partly because I now have the “Stallkeeper’s Sheen” (a shade lighter than that other sign of too much fun, “Rioja Rouge”) that comes from spending every Saturday outside all day in the sunshine, thrusting books at unsuspecting Balhamites. But mostly because I’m just back from a day of marquees, sustainable fashion sold by people in funny hats and a portaloo queue snaking across a random Oxfordshire field. Yes, it’s festival season.
This particular festival was the inaugural edition of KITE, co-organised by the clever people behind Tortoise, purveyors of longform journalism and podcasts. It was a jolly affair with lots of brightly-coloured fluttering paper (flags if not exactly kites), ice creams, music and an excellent line-up of speakers. I particularly enjoyed Tina Brown talking about royal gossip and her new book, The Palace Papers. My mole in the bookshop told me George Monbiot’s Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet sold out.
Apart from a topped-up suntan, I came away a reaffirmed conviction that, after two years indoors, people are keen to share the company of like-minded strangers and hear interesting and provocative speakers, not over a crackly video connection but in the same room as them.
Which is fortunate given that, to the extent I have a business plan, that’s a big part of it. Once I have a premises, I want to bring people together at least once a week to share thoughts on a great book or chew over the topic of the moment.
As ever, I’m keen to hear your thoughts on how best to do that, especially when there are things you haven’t seen done before that you think would be fun to try. Which is why I asked about speakers you’d love to hear from in the very first survey I did.
I didn’t prompt any answers, so these are all people who have been spontaneously mentioned by several of you. One name that kept cropping up is rather familiar. Bloody Stephen Bush! I met Stephen in my first week at university, shared a flat with him in second year and the student paper office in third year, then grew accustomed to hearing him wanging on about one political issue of the moment or another on the sofa in the house we shared after uni. Anyway, it’s a delight that this wanging now bares the imprimatur of the Financial Times - and, apparently, many of you. I will certainly try to lure him south of the river for you!
Anyway, here’s the top 20, as nominated by the 1,233 people who took the survey. It’s a bit of fun, but also a very handy wishlist…I’ll definitely be trying to persuade several of them to come.
1 = Marina Hyde
1 = Tom Holland (“or is it Hollander”)
3. Stephen Bush
4. Zadie Smith (“always good to listen to”)
5. Mary Beard
6. Sebastian Barry
7 = Lyse Doucet (“Let's hope Clive Myrie is able to tell his story with Lyse Doucet in safe times to come.”)
7 = Max Porter
9. Margaret Atwood (“forensic researchers like Margaret Atwood rather than big egos who like to pontificate on Twitter”)
10. John Lanchester (“describing things that we thought were too complex to understand”)
11. Patrick Radden Keefe
12. Robert Macfarlane
13. Robert Harris
14 = Hilary Mantel
14 = Cal Flyn
16. Neil Gaiman
17. Rory Stewart
18. Sally Rooney
19. Elif Shafak
20. Ali Smith
Also requested by several people each: Adam Phillips, Adam Tooze, Candice Carty-Williams, Chris Power, Clover Stroud, David Peace, David Sedaris, Diana Henry, Dominic Sandbrook, Douglas Stuart, Emily Maitlis, Emmanuel Carrere, Geoff Dyer, Grace Dent, Helen Thompson, Ian McEwan, Isabel Hardman, Jia Tolentino, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Liew, Kate Atkinson, Lindsey Hilsum, Marie Le Conte, Matt Haig, Pankaj Mishra, Peter Hennessy, Sam Harris, Samira Ahmed, Sarah Churchwell, Simon Schama, Tim Marshall
Quite the list!
Please do tell me about any other authors or public figures you’d love to hear from - just hit reply to this email or post in the comments on my Substack page. I’d also love to hear what sort of events you think work best: readings or interviews; panels or just one speaker; big names or debut authors… Let me know.
In the meantime, I’m thrilled that James Barr, historian and local resident, will join me at the pop-up stall on Hildreth Street in Balham this coming Saturday (18th) at 2.30pm. He will be selling and signing copies of his books about power games in the Middle East, A Line in the Sand and Lords of the Desert. Please come along and say hi!
Tom
In the papers
You can buy these books from Backstory
The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris. The Economist thinks this life of Harold Gillies, the pioneering reconstructive surgeon, makes for “an engaging biography of a masterful surgeon as well as a heartening account of medical progress”.
The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America by David Gelles. A “short, sharp, provocative” biography of the former boss of General Electric. "“It is a leap to hold Welch largely responsible for the evisceration of corporate America and the corruption of its body politic [but] David Gelles has a good try,” says the FT. “[Gelles] is good at tracing former GE executives’ trajectories after they moved on to run other companies: a sharp upward tick in the short term, as job-cutting and GE-style efficiency measures took hold, followed by a slow decline in the share price, the culture, or both.”
The Kingdom of Sand by Andrew Holleran. “Holleran, the author of Dancer from the Dance, a 1978 cult classic about the gay scene in Seventies New York, makes us look at the reality of old age,” says Robbie Millen in The Times. “Holleran, who will be 80 next year, is a keen-eyed observer. Our bodies shrink as we age, but the bits don’t shrink at the same pace. The narrator describes how his friend ‘slumped in the chair beside mine seemed to have been reduced to three elements: belly, hands, and glasses.’”