Ten non-fiction books to read over the summer holidays, including Keir Starmer: The Biography

Keir Starmer: The Biography, by Tom Baldwin (William Collins) Keir Starmer’s friends often don’t recognise the politician they see on TV. “There is this enormous gap between Keir the human being and Keir the politician,” says Philippe Sands, the writer and lawyer. Mark Adams, an old school mate, insists there is another side to the Labour leader “which I wish others could see a bit more”. Tom Baldwin’s new biography, based on interviews with more than a hundred people – including Starmer, his friends, family and closest colleagues – offers a fascinating insight into this other, hidden side. It humanises a figure whose buttoned-up, cautious persona masks a life that has been anything but bland. Baldwin admits some will say he is far from an impartial observer. Previously a journalist, he was Labour’s communications director under Ed Miliband. This is not an authorised biography – Starmer had no control over the finished product – but “those hoping to find these pages spattered with blood” are warned they will be disappointed. (Alistair Grant) Read the full review here

The Mack, by Robyne Calvert (Yale) It’s a difficult moment to publish a book about the Mackintosh building. While there’s much to say about Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterwork, voted in 2009 Britain’s favourite building of the last 175 years, there’s no escaping the fact that it now lies in ruins following two devastating fires in 2014 and 2018. Robyne Calvert, a cultural historian now based at Glasgow University, was Mackintosh Research Fellow at Glasgow School of Art from 2015-2021, and her book was originally planned as “a document of the resurgence of the building” after the 2014 fire. Instead, any future restoration is mired in delay and controversy. The Mack, she says, is now “an ephemeral thing, existing somewhere between wreckage and memory”. (Susan Mansfield) Read the full review here

Negotiating with the Devil, by Pierre Hazan (Hurst) In 1993, as a journalist reporting on the war in Bosnia, Pierre Hazan was with a team of humanitarian workers who were suddenly tasked to decide who should be released from a grim detention camp. Until that point, Hazan had been a "fact finder” but now he found himself part of a group involved in a traumatic selection process. Suddenly he realised that his actions were in conflict with his ideals. The experience led to his now distinguished role in armed conflict mediation. His short book is a breathtaking, demanding, but vital read. It takes the reader into the background of conflict resolution. It itemises the wars and conflicts that have proliferated since the end of the Cold War, their causes, and the errors made in the efforts to resolve them. Looming large in this complicated picture is President George W Bush’s “War on Terror”, a declaration that had the effect of preventing potential mediators having any contact with a checklist of “terrorist organisations.” The Taliban were among these, of course. After tens of thousands of deaths, the US did eventually talk to them, and ended a war. (Vin Arthey) Read the full review here

Sir Keir Starmer PIC: Oli Scarff/AFP/Getty Images

We Loved It All, by Lydia Millet (WW Norton) I first came across Lydia Millet’s work in 2007 when I reviewed O Pure And Radiant Heart, her tremendous novel in which the physicists Szilard, Fermi and Oppenheimer appear in present day America immediately after, from their perspective, detonating the first atom bomb in New Mexico. Of her other works I managed to get Everybody’s Pretty, a scathing novel based on her having sub-edited and written for Larry Flynt’s pornographic magazines, and the outrageous comedy George Bush, Dark Prince Of Love. But being intrigued by her work was something of a quest, since later works rarely had UK publishers. I did read How The Dead Dream but did not see the two other parts of the trilogy, Ghost Lights and Magnificence. I can only hope that the publication of We Loved It All might nudge the risk-averse British publishers to take notice – it worked, eventually, for Percival Everett. We Loved It All is Millet’s first work of non-fiction, and can be read profitably alongside her previous novel, A Children’s Bible, which was shortlisted for the Pulitzer and the National Book Award in the States and deals with many of the same concerns. Although her work is characterised as idiosyncratic or quirky or capricious, Millet is really just unswervingly herself. Although she writes with arch wit, she is an urgently moral author. (Stuart Kelly) Read the full review here

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland – A New History, by Alistair Moffat (Birlinn) “In 1159 BC the Icelandic volcano known as Hekla suddenly blew itself apart… A deadly darkness descended over the mountains, glans and islands, a perpetual twilight that must have seemed to many like the evening of the world.” This dramatic passage from the first chapter of Alistair Moffat’s history of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland is a reminder that violent climate change can occur without human help. Moffat’s history goes way, way back and then comes up to the present day. It isn’t, and could not be, a continuous narrative except in the broadest of outlines. It is the work of an enthusiast with a Borderer’s passion for the north and the islands. Moffat is always asking himself how things were then – then being any point from many centuries before Scotland was Scotland right up to, more or less, last week. He ranges about like a spaniel released from a car after a long journey. (Allan Massie) Read the full review here

Hannah Ritchie: Not the End of the World (Chatto & Windus) The doom-laden narrative around environmental crisis often feels inescapable. Whether it’s the political failure of another summit or the personal failure to go vegan (again), the overriding sense is that we’re not doing enough and it’s all too late. Each new freak weather event seems only to confirm this. So the first book by young Scottish data scientist Hannah Ritchie is a welcome breath of fresh air. Falkirk-born Ritchie, who was named Scotland’s Youth Champion in 2022, argues that things have already improved, and further change is possible, even up to full sustainability. As lead researcher at the website Our World in Data and an academic at the University of Oxford, she cheerfully crunches numbers to back up everything she says. Ritchie admits that, when studying Environmental Geoscience at Edinburgh University in the Noughties, she felt “helpless” herself and nearly abandoned the field. Her inspiration was Swedish physician and statistician Hans Rosling, who challenged the narrative on global poverty using data to show how much had improved. She hopes to do the same for the environment. (Susan Mansfield) Read the full review here

Reading Genesis, by Marilynne Robinson (Virago) The simplest questions are often the most difficult to answer. This is not just one of the themes of Marilynne Robinson’s new work, but applies directly to it: what kind of a book is this? What genre is it? In a way, the description beneath the ISBN is both true and useless: “religion”. It is probably easier to describe what it is not. It is not fiction, even though Robinson’s fiction – Housekeeping and then the interlinked quartet of Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack – are amongst the most subtle and luminous of religious fictions. Although one reviewer, slightly impishly called it – I paraphrase – a sermon only not boring, it is not really a sermon, not least because sermons normally explicate a short text and this reading takes on the whole of the book of Genesis. It is longer than an essay, it is mostly impersonal and not at all like a memoir, and it is not a work of literary criticism: it is less concerned with the how of the text than the why and wherefore of it. The best I can say is that it is a sincere and very intelligent reader’s response to Genesis and asks us how we should respond to it. (Stuart Kelly) Read the full review here

Hannah Ritchie PIC: Angela Catlin

Atoms of Delight: Ten Pilgrimages in Nature, by Kenneth Steven (Saraband) The poet and author Kenneth Steven had, he says, “a deeply religious childhood”, one that “stemmed mainly from my mother’s own Free Church background.” That being the case, you might reasonably expect his new book about pilgrimages to take an overtly religious approach to the subject. The book’s subtitle – “Ten Pilgrimages in Nature” – might even put some readers in mind of the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose early, sprung-rhythm raptures concerning the wonders of the natural world always seem to link back somehow to his faith. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” he confidently asserted at the start of his 1877 sonnet, “God’s Grandeur”, and pretty much everything he clapped eyes on during this wildly optimistic period of his life seemed to confirm that view. Steven’s relationship with his subject, however, is a lot more complicated – and a lot more interesting. He does not continually catch glimpses of the Almighty in finches’ wings, in skies of couple-colour, in trout acne, or in the fiery plumage of apparently self-immolating kingfishers. Instead, in spite of his religious upbringing – or perhaps because of it – he offers a warmly inclusive and decidedly secular series of essays about what it means to make a pilgrimage in the early years of the 21st century. (Roger Cox) Read the full review here

Night Train to Odessa, by Jen Stout (Polygon) The public’s appetite for news of a continuing war tends to flag – understandably, perhaps, when there seems to be something close to stalemate. That’s how the war in Ukraine looks now, more than two years after the Russian invasion, Vladimir Putin’s attempt to conquer a now independent country that was once part of the old USSR. His first thrust failed, humiliatingly, and the brutality of Russian troops inspired Ukrainian patriotism. The West responded by supplying the Ukrainian government with weapons and aid. For a time, a Russian defeat seemed possible. However, last summer’s Ukrainian offensive failed. Cities and towns are still being bombed. Further, urgently needed Western aid is not forthcoming in sufficient scale. We may be in for a prolonged war, at best a stalemate, and consequently the conflict is rarely at the top of the news agenda. This makes Jen Stout’s memoir of her time as a freelance reporter in Ukraine during the first year of the war all the more important. It is a timely reminder of what is at stake. In her last chapter, she recalls a Ukrainian friend, a judge and army volunteer, telling her “If we don’t win now, Ukraine will never exist again. It will be destroyed. It will become part of Russia” – Putin’s Russia, a criminal state. (Allan Massie) Read the full review here

The Wild Men, by David Torrance (Bloomsbury) Labour is expected to win the coming General Election. Few will be surprised and few, except on the hysterical Tory right wing, will be greatly alarmed. Things were very different, however, when the first Labour Government was formed just over a hundred years ago. There was apprehension in much of the country, the City of London and the royal court. How would these “wild men” behave? Weren’t some of them Bolsheviks? In fact fears were quickly allayed. Panic subsided. For one thing it was a minority government, dependent on Liberal support for a majority in the Commons. It had been a snap election and, though the Conservatives remained the largest party in the Commons they had clearly lost support. The outgoing Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who was determined to prevent a class war in Britain, saw the merit of bringing the rising Labour Party into office. So did the veteran Liberal leader and former Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. But no one did more to demonstrate that Labour could be a sensible and competent government than the Labour leader, Ramsay MacDonald. MacDonald, a remarkable man who who very successfully served as Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister, is the first hero of David Torrance’s admirable, thoroughly researched and yet very readable account of the first Labour government. (Allan Massie) Read the full review here