Best books… Edward Stourton
The veteran journalist and broadcaster picks his favourite books. In a new memoir, Confessions: Life Re-examined (Doubleday £20), he reflects wryly and candidly on his life as a reporter and the events that shaped it
Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, 1938 (Penguin £9.99). The funniest and truest novel about journalism. The hapless Boot, Lord Copper of the Daily Beast, the roguish Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, star of the Daily Brute – we reporters have known real-life versions of them all, and drunk with them at the bar of Ishmaelia’s Liberty Hotel. And we have all tried to deflect a foolish boss with some variant of “Up to a point, Lord Copper”.
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable by E. Cobham Brewer, 1870 (Chambers £35). Everything is so easy to look up online now, my once-treasured reference books lie unconsulted. I miss the serendipitous discoveries they offer. Look up “cabinet minister” in Brewer (“these ministers are permitted to consult the Sovereign in the private cabinet of the palace”) and you’ll discover that “cabbage” as a verb means “to filch” (as in “Your tailor, instead of shreds, cabbages whole yards of cloth”).
A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle by Julian T. Jackson, 2018 (Penguin £18.99). A lifetime’s work, and all the years of scholarship really show. The endlessly complex character of France’s greatest 20th century leader is revealed in full, and the narrative is gripping.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, 1877 (Penguin £8.99). Beyond compare. Not for the doomed heroine and her stiff lover, but for the warmth and sometimes the chaos of Levin and Kitty’s marriage.
Herzog by Saul Bellow, 1964 (Penguin £9.99). The first sentence is enough to know you will enjoy the ride: “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.” The story of a “great sufferer, joker and moaner, cuckold, charmer, a man of our time” is also the great novel of the American century. In fact, having pulled it off the shelf for this piece, I am going to reread it. Starting now.
Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop on 020-3176 3835. For out-of-print books visit biblio.co.uk