Books

All too revealing of how the system works ... how the talented former chief of the FT, capitalism’s house journal, was in thrall to ‘movers and shakers’

Even a brilliant newspaper editor can undersell a good story on the front page. At the start of Lionel Barber’s account of the world from his perspective as editor of the Financial Times between 2005 and 2020, there is an extensive list of dramatis personae, almost all of them male. (“One day,” he writes later, “I will deal with the alpha male problem, but not today.”) The players are broken down into their categories: politics, business and finance, royalty, journalism and diplomacy. The heart sinks – if journalism sits so easily in such a cast list, how can it do its job of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?

His skills as a fixer are finely honed – but they cannot restore a pre-Trump normality. As president, Biden’s private self, shadowed by loss, must come into its own

Every year after 1975, Joe Biden, his second wife Jill, his sons Beau and Hunter and their growing families, would gather for Thanksgiving on Nantucket island off Cape Cod. Part of the annual ritual was that the Bidens would take a photograph of themselves in front of a quaint old house in the traditional New England style that stood above the dunes on their favourite beach.

In November 2014, when Biden was serving as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he found, where the house should have been, an empty space marked out by yellow police tape. The building, he wrote in his memoir Promise Me, Dad had “finally run out of safe ground and run out of time; it had been swept out into the Atlantic”.

Now that it’s a reality, can an esteemed historian produce convincing arguments for the UK’s departure from the EU?

They may have triumphed in politics, but in academia, Brexiters are an embattled minority. Perhaps the most combative of their tribunes is the emeritus professor of history at Cambridge, Robert Tombs. Beyond the innate value of dissent, Tombs’s own position is also intrinsically interesting. As a brilliant historian of 19th-century France, he can hardly be written off as a Little Englander. As a French citizen by marriage, he presumably continues to enjoy the benefits of EU citizenship as well, so he has less skin in the game than most.

A short, punchy, eloquent statement from such a distinguished historian on the case for the kind of very hard Brexit that has now become a reality raises hopes for some genuine illumination. But The Sovereign Isle will, for varying reasons, disappoint both many of Tombs’s fellow Brexiters and anyone looking for a cogent statement of what this great disruption means for the economic and political future of the UK.

He was the greatest English novelist of his generation, yet just before his death he became an Irish citizen of the EU. The reasons were both political and deeply personal, but at their heart lay one thing: betrayal

• An exclusive extract from his new novel

• Writers reveal their favourite le Carré

I’m looking at one of the last photographs of John le Carré. It was taken by his son Nick in October 2020. There is a mostly empty bottle of good beaujolais in front of him and a glimpse through the window behind of the Cornish landscape that he inhabited with such delight. His beloved wife and most important collaborator, Jane, is seated next to him, laughing heartily.