This is pretty obscure as far as reading lists go, but then this is warm, muggy Wednesday in late July. So, via BBC, here is a list of suggested summer reading from the British Conservative Party's spokesman for foreign affairs:

• The Junior Officers' Reading Club: Killing Time and Fighting Wars by Patrick Hennessey
• A View from the Foothills by Chris Mullin
• Alan Clark: the biography by Ion Trewin (published mid-September)
• Pistols at Dawn: Two Hundred years of Political Rivalry from Pitt and Fox to Blair and Brown by John Campbell
• Electing Our Masters: The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair by Jon Lawrence
• Whitehall: The Street that Shaped a Nation by Colin Brown
• Neville Chamberlain by Nick Smart (published August)
• Attlee's Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character by Frank Field
• Harold Macmillan by Charles Williams
• Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-1945 by Max Hastings (published September)
• D-Day by Antony Beevor
• Blood Victory: The Sacrifice of the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century by William Philpott
• Democracy: 1000 Years in Pursuit of British Liberty by Peter Kellner
• The New British Constitution by Vernon Bogdanor
• The Life and Death of Democracy by John Keane
• Democracy Goes to War: British Military Deployments under International Law by Nigel D White
• Lords of Finance: 1929, The Great Depression - and the Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamad
• Keynes: The Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky
• The Spectre at the Feast: Capitalist Crisis and the Politics of Recession by Andrew Gamble
• Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System by Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson (eds)
• Europe's Tragedy: A History of the Thirty years War by Peter H. White
• Poland: A History by Adam Zamoyski
• The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China by Jay Taylor
• The Terrorist Hunters by Andy Hayman (currently withdrawn for legal reasons)
• Terrorism: How to Respond by Richard English
• The Defence of the Realm: The Official History of MI5 by Christopher Andrew (published October)
• The Pathans by Sir Olaf Caroe

I hope Tory MPs can expense Caroe's book -- it isn't cheap.

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