Peter Hitchens' Top Book Recommendations

Peter Hitchens

It’s about a show trial and it’s also a moment in the life of Eric Ambler, who I think is one of the most intelligent and illuminating thriller writers of the 20th century, when he goes through that moment that a lot of left-wing people go through when he realises that what he used to believe in isn’t sound any more, and he does it with his usual great intelligence and his fine plotting and understanding of how people actually behave and work. There are also some wonderful descriptions of what it was like to be a journalist trying to operate in a Communist capital and some marvellous moments of seediness which Graham Greene couldn’t have outdone. I can’t recommend it highly enough to anybody who’s interested in both in thrillers and in politics. [source]

Peter Hitchens

Many years ago I was told by the wife of Jack Jones, who had in her distant youth been a Comintern courier – gold one way and messages the other – that whatever else I did I should go to Prague, where you could encounter the faint echoes of prewar Europe and was also an astonishingly beautiful city. So in 1977, when it was not fashionable to go there and when stag nights were not held there and people didn’t even know where it was on the map, I and my wife set out on a visit there and it exceeded expectations. Then to stumble across this novel by Lionel Davidson, an author who has been very unfairly neglected, it seems to me! [source]

Peter Hitchens

Shute was an engineer and a successful aircraft designer. People who judge the standard of their books by slightly higher measures than I do, might think that these books read more like engineering than like fiction. But the fact is they are very well engineered and they all have an understanding of what prewar society was like and they have a strong hatred of snobbery, which he particularly loathed. In this case you move from a disillusioned Anglican parson in the wilds of Australia going to the rescue of an old drunk man and being transported as a result, into an attempt to murder the Queen in an imaginary Britain of the early 1950s. [source]

Peter Hitchens

This is all about the United States and it’s a novel based really, I think, on the Alger Hiss/Whittaker Chambers hearings, but it fictionalises them beautifully. If you read this book and then you watch, in future, a hearing on the confirmation of a secretary of state or a supreme court judge, you will understand far better as a result of it how these things happen than you otherwise would. It is dated, but in an instructive way. Allen Drury was a reporter for Associated Press on Capitol Hill before he wrote it. It was his one big success, filmed slightly unsatisfactorily with Charles Laughton, of all people, playing a particularly wonderful and devious senator, who is my favourite character in the book. I understood American politics much better after reading it. [source]

Peter Hitchens

This is by Constantine FitzGibbon, about whom I know very little. He lived a rather rackety life and is, alas, no longer with us. The title comes from a haunting Browning poem called ‘A Tocatta of Galuppi’s’, which contains the words ‘Venice spent what Venice earned’, and these lines: [source]