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Product Description
Jeremy Paxman knows every maneouvre a politician will make to avoid answering a difficult question, but here he seeks an answer to just one: What makes politicians tick?
Embarking on a journey in which he encounters movers and shakers past and present, he discovers:
• that Prime Ministers have often lost a parent in childhood
• why Trollope is the politician’s novelist of choice
• that Lloyd George once hunted Jack the Ripper
• how an Admiral’s speech in parliament helped win WWII
Where do politicians come from? How do they get elected? What do they do all day? And why do they seek power? All these questions and many more are addressed in Paxman’s thrilling dissection of that strange and elusive breed – the political animal.
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That means, of course, that it's not a work of academic political science. Rather it's a work of inspired journalism by a master feature-writer.
Feature writers commonly weave together three things - facts, quotes and anecdotes - and they hang them on a theme. Usually they provide plenty of facts and quotes but good anecdotes are normally in short supply (or badly written) even though they are the ingredients that build readability.
Jeremy Paxman not only provides plenty of facts and striking quotes in his analysis of British politicians and their wayward habits but also gives us a text fairly bristling with pertinent anecdotes drawn from the politics of the past century or so.
It's important to make this point because the questions he sets out to answer may seem dull to the common reader: "Where do politicians come from? Why do they do it? Why do we seem so disenchanted with them? And why does the experience of politics nearly always end in disillusion?"
With admirable impartiality and in a sparkling prose style, Paxman hangs his diverting collection of facts, quotes and anecdotes on the theme that politicians are generally untrustworthy, power-hungry, hypocritical, naive or disillusioned. Certainly almost all of them end with their ideals or illusions badly battered by the experience of an adversary system which is corrupted by competition, connivance, secrecy and rivalry. Privately few of them ever have a good word to say about a colleague or competitor.
Almost all of them end disillusioned and the most disillusioned of all are those who climb highest. If these high-flyers don't end in defeat or disgrace, they fade (thank goodness!) into obscurity.
Sounds dull, but it ain't. This book is a buzz from beginning to end. Even if you've never read another book on politics - and even if you aren't British - you can read this one with immense enjoyment and learn much as you laugh and curse your way through its sparkling text. This is a rare case in which the word "brilliant" is completely apposite.
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