Kirjahaku

Can great art be produced in a police state? Josef Stalin ran one of the most oppressive regimes in world history. Nevertheless, Stalinist Russia produced an outpouring of artistic works of immense power. More than a dozen great artists were visible enough for Stalin to take an interest in them - which meant he chose whether they were to live in luxury and be publicly honoured or to be sent to the Lubyanka for torture and execution. Journalist and novelist Andy McSmith brings together the stories of these artists, revealing how they pursued their art, often at great risk.

Westminster and Whitehall are secret worlds, hidden to most. But working as a lobby journalist, Andy McSmith has had exclusive access to our top politicians for decades. Here, he shares his personal encounters with the great and the good of the British political landscape, revealing what they are really like behind the scenes.

'Affable, invisible... the man with a brilliant future behind him.' Thus Varsity magazine appraised Kenneth Clarke's term as President of the Cambridge Union in the summer of 1963. Dominated by his opposition to the admission of women students to the Union, Clarke's Presidency had been less than distinguished. But Varsity, like so many commentators throughout Clarke's political career, seriously underestimated a politician who, three decades later, has emerged as a strong man within a weak Conservative administration, often tipped as a possible successor to John Major should the bailiffs be summoned to Number Ten.Clarke, as Andy McSmith explains in this fast-paced and highly readable biography, is above all a survivor who has been a government minister since 1979. Despite his reputation as the 'thinking man's lager lout', Clarke is an old-fashioned 1960s One-Nation Tory who played the tough guy with considerable adroitness in order to survive under Thatcher's hard-line administration. Displaying the same joviality which has seen him sign up for both the Campaign for Social Democracy and the Conservative Club on arrival at Cambridge, Clarke frankly admitted in the 1970s that it was only the arithmetic of Britain's first-past-the-post election system which kept him in the same party as the British nationalists of the Tory right. His pragmatism served him well as he progressed from being the youngest high-flier in the Heath government to the Minister responsible for introducing the highly controversial 'internal market' in the NHS under Thatcher, and now to the happy position of Chancellor of the Exchequer with an economy recovering from recession.Clarke's presence at the heart of the Tory government demonstrates that the mix of free-market liberalism and British nationalism to which Mrs Thatcher gave her name never really took root in the Conservative government. Right-wing Tory rebels who plead that the EC is destroying Britain as a nation-state, or free-market ideologues who want to privitize whatever remains of the welfare state, find Kenneth Clarke an obstacle to their ambitions. From Clarke's point of view, social instability and trade barriers are bad for business. The rise and rise of this most flexible of politicians, according to Andy McSmith's engaging account, may not be enough to stop the cracks in a Tory Party now beyond repair.

A highly praised new history of that most turbulent of decades: the 1980s.

Updated since the May 1997 election, Faces of Labour gives a unique insight into a range of Labour politicians in a series of entertaining and revealing portraits. With a substantial lead in the opinion polls, the Labour Party looks set to take over the reins of Britain s government within a year. Ironically, just at the point when Labour appears to be a government in waiting, it has never been more difficult to judge exactly what we can expect from Labour in government. New slogans and buzz words appear on almost a daily basis, as the Labour Party continues to redefine itself after two decades in opposition. In Faces of Labour Andy McSmith brings an expert eye to bear on the enormous changes Labour has undergone on the long road back to Number 10. A former party press officer and now a political correspondent for the Observer, few people are better qualified than Andy McSmith to give an account-both as an insider and as a critical observer-of what is really going on in the Labour Party. McSmith describes the transition from a party dominated by the radical left into a social democratic party. He reassesses the tensions between Old and New Labour, focusing on individuals whose careers throw different aspects of a complex story into sharp relief. McSmith gives a sharp insider's account of the key figures in the Labour hierarchy, including Peter Mandelson-the man described as Tony Blair's Rasputin-John Prescott, Robin Cook, Clare Short and, of course, Tony Blair himself. He also looks at those on the underside of the party-figures such as Ted Grant, guru of the Militant Tendency, and the late Jim Murray, a Tyneside shop steward who, by combination of pure chance and the power of the block vote, once held the future of Labour in his hands. Faces of Labour is crammed with the kind of telling detail available only to a writer who has observed his subject from close up. If you want to know what to expect from the New Labour government, this lively and accessible book is an indispensable guide.

"He was surrounded on every side by those who wanted to be. Some wanted to be famous, some to be praised, some to be on television every night, some to be outstandingly loyal, some to be famously disloyal, some to be driven by chauffeurs in ministerial cars and some to be Prime Minister. They were breathing down his neck and pressing against his sides; but Joseph Pilgrim's life had been so full of what he wanted to do that he had never applied himself to wanting to be anything. He certainly had not expected to be a Member of Parliament, until that singular status rose up one evening and took over his life."Joseph Pilgrim is the hero of Andy McSmith's compelling fictional debut. Pilgrim has already made several wrong career moves before he is swept into the House of Commons by Labour's landslide in 1997, much to his own surprise. Ingenuous, though nobody's fool, he tries to avoid joining a system of patronage and sycophancy, but cannot stop himself from stumbling repeatedly upward towards success. It's not long before the Prime Minister is making inquiries about the mysterious newcomer and the front benches beckon. But when the story of a sexual peccadillo from long ago falls into the hands of Grub Street's grubbiest, Pilgrim's past returns to haunt him. Andy McSmith draws on long experience as a Labour Party press officer and political journalist to create a convincing and exciting tale of politics and scandal. His story is enlivened by cameo appearances of characters that bear an eerily close resemblance to real political figures.