Get In: The Inside Story of Labour Under Starmer
by Patrick Maguire & Gabriel Pogrund (Bodley Head, £25)
This book tells the tale of Keir Starmer’s ruthless ascent from the backbenches to Number 10. The protagonist, however, is not really Starmer himself—but his right-hand man, Morgan McSweeney, who, like some Machiavellian genius, guides him to the summit of British politics through subterfuge.
In granular detail, Pogrund and Maguire disclose the inner workings of the Starmer-McSweeney project as it unseats Corbyn, purges the left and sweeps the Tories from the board. The pair are merciless, and people, as well as promises, are disposed of with terrifying impersonality.
Starmer watches over the chaos dispassionately. Always staying out of the trenches, his dirty work is delegated to McSweeney, who plots his rise with the sleepless intensity of a madman. The Irishman is presented as an almost omnipotent force.
However, at moments, we wonder whether his brilliance has been overstated for effect. Perhaps McSweeney is more Napoleon than Machiavelli, endowed with the fortune of a lucky general—the high-risk votes go his way, all of his enemies implode.
After 438 pages, Starmer’s motivations remain unclear. Like a horizon, as we approach him, he pulls away. This, we come to learn, is how he remains, even to his tight-knit inner circle.
The Labour leader’s ideology also remains a mystery. Much of his political thinking is delegated to McSweeney, who focuses on bringing Labour closer to the views of the white working class, whom he longs to recapture.
The narrative is recounted in clean, compelling prose albeit with the over-repetition of certain metaphors; “cudgels” are too often wielded, struggles are repeatedly “Darwinian”.
But be not mistaken, this is an astonishing feat of journalism. The writers obtained a remarkable level of access, and in the end, you feel that this is as close to an accurate retelling of Starmer’s rise as anyone could have given.
Cormac Kehoe
Your Life Is Manufactured: How We Make Things, Why It Matters and How We Can Do It Better
by Tim Minshall (Faber, £20)
Back in the 1990s, economists and politicians waxed lyrical about how “high-end services” would underpin the future prosperity of “post-industrial” nations like the UK. Fast forward to 2025 and nobody is cheering the decline of domestic manufacturing anymore—least of all Tim Minshall.
In Your Life is Manufactured, Minshall, a professor of innovation at Cambridge university, argues that “you can’t build a whole strong economy based only on [chip designers], investment banks, and management consultants”. That this now sounds like conventional wisdom is a sign of how far the intellectual zeitgeist—and geopolitical reality—has shifted since globalisation’s heyday.
Minshall makes the case for manufacturing’s importance with stories rather than statistics. He invites us to marvel at the ingenuity—and indispensability—of British manufacturers who, at the height of the Covid pandemic, pivoted to making ventilators and PPE, helping to avert shortages. The not-so-subtle implication is that we take this capacity to make things for granted at our peril. In a world that has, for decades, prioritised efficiency over resilience, the supply chains of even the most everyday items are frighteningly complex and fragile. This, Minshall demonstrates, is as true for toilet roll as it is for semiconductors.
Minshall’s tone is anything but gloomy, though. He is a cheery guide to the manufacturing world. Occasionally, his glass-three-quarters-full outlook leads him to omit or skate over inconvenient truths—especially in his chapter on sustainability. (Look up the rebound effect, because you won’t read about it in this book.)
But it feels borderline churlish to point these omissions out. His desire to infect others with his enthusiasm for how stuff gets made is laudable. Moreover, given the current state of British manufacturing, a bit of boosterism may be just what’s needed.
Richard Roberts
Watching the Jackals: Prague’s Covert Liaisons with Cold War Terrorists and Revolutionaries
by Daniela Richterova (Georgetown UP, £32)
Who spies on the spies? Everybody—according to Daniela Richterova’s intriguing new book, which follows Czech spies and international terrorists and revolutionaries throughout the Cold War. Declassified Czech archives provide the hard evidence; a rare treasure trove. Prague backed foreign revolutionaries with ideological sympathies: Cubans, South Africans and, notably, Palestinians.
The “jackals” were non-state actors—including, famously, Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan hitman who worked for the Palestinians before going rogue. Prague interacted with these individuals outside its official diplomacy with the PLO and its leader at the time, Yasser Arafat. This book unravels how strong these ties were, who was in control and what this says about intelligence and terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s.
The Cold War wasn’t just a stand-off between Moscow and Washington. The author places Prague centre-stage, in the aftermath of the failed, pro-west Prague Spring. Typically, this chapter of Czech history is presented as a deep-freeze—the domestic crackdown and pivot towards Moscow gave the impression that not much else was happening—yet Richterova exposes the country’s sophisticated, independent foreign policy.
Prague monitored the jackals on Czech soil, often before betraying and expelling them after their usefulness expired. There are colourful moments—a disguised Carlos makes back-to-back attempts to enter the country on one day in 1979; a terrorist insists that he and his wife are only in Prague for “Christmas shopping”.
After the Iron Curtain fell, Czech files on Carlos ultimately contributed to his arrest and imprisonment by France. The book makes the case that Czech intelligence officers, while anti-western, often used “western” anti-terror measures—serving them well in their future independent country.
Pippa Crawford
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
by Agnes Callard (Allen Lane, £25)
How often do we feel really excited by a book by a philosophy professor? It is surely as rare as the feeling that we are reading a great work of literary or art criticism. We all want to be able to read such things and feel the author’s enthusiasm, but it is more often as much a chore as a true intellectual pleasure.
Open Socrates by Agnes Callard is such a book. I could hardly put it down. My copy is full of markings and foldings.
The book’s provoking question is philosophically familiar: “There is a thought you are avoiding your whole life, namely, the thought that your life may be unjustified, and when you confront it, your life unravels.” But the response is quite unfamiliar. Callard argues that we can only respond to such meaning-of-life questions in conversation with another person. Further, she argues that this is what Socrates was doing. So she provides both a new way to live a philosophical life—and to deal with any mid-life crisis—and an interesting perspective on Socrates.
People are every day confronting the sort of crisis Callard describes. They are offered—and all too willingly take up—many cheap, easy, insufficient solutions: Netflix auto-play, folk therapy, tea-towel wisdom, self-help psychology, horoscopes, influencer content. Maybe some of this helps some of the time.
But what Callard offers is more practical. Find someone you can talk to about these questions. Accept that being wrong is just as useful to you as being right. Don’t avoid boredom, seek truth. Spend some of your time, that is, talking in order to acquire knowledge about life and goodness.
Henry Oliver
The Shetland Way: Community and Climate Crisis on my Father’s Islands
by Marianne Brown (Borough Press, £16.99)
Exploitation for extraction is a tale as old capitalism, but it is brought to life in vivid colours in Marianne Brown’s The Shetland Way. During the pandemic, Brown returned to Shetland for her father’s funeral. Subsequently forced to lock down on that Scottish archipelago, she is confronted with her personal, familial and cultural history at every turn.
Part-way through her stay, she discovers that a large onshore wind farm is going to be built through the heart of mainland Shetland. The community is split on the damage this will do to the local landscape versus the importance of transitioning away from finite fossil fuels.
It’s here where the present mirrors the past: Shetland has a long history of resource exploitation. As Brown reflects, “Like the herring, the whales and the oil, this latest industry was another pattern sewn into the Shetland identity: contrasting threads of killing to sustain life.”
While environmental books can be off-puttingly moralistic, Brown relates the human impacts of renewable energy in the manner of a skilful novelist rather than of a hectoring activist. And while The Shetland Way is slow-moving in places, the pace works for the book, not least because it allows time for us to get to grips with this expansive, enigmatic territory.
The Shetland Way follows the story of losing not only a loved one, but also a way of life. It explores the significance of modernity in reshaping Shetland.
Even if the archipelago is distant to you, Brown conveys themes of loss and struggle to which we can all relate— perhaps increasingly so.
Petra Pender
