Diaries: Into Politics v.2: Into Politics

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

We have given this a press date of 24 July. We will get paperback review coverage and Ion will be doing interviews. Jane and Ion are doing an event at the Winchester Festival on 10 July. More news in the next bulletin.

UK Kirkus review

The second, posthumous, volume of Alan Clark's notorious diaries is not nearly as notorious as the first. Somehow the oomph has gone out of them, maybe because we have now got used to his extraordinary personality, and are more difficult to surprise by his accounts of gambling, drinking, picking up woman (though there is one hilarious account of his spotting a prey in the gallery of the House of Commons, and engaging her in less time than it took the speaker to shout 'Order! Order!'). For those who found him so fascinatingly awful, there is plenty of material here to support their views - Clark being sentimental about animals but insufferable to humans, for instance. There is an horrendous and apparently unrepentant account of his reducing a perfectly harmless young German tourist to tears at a dinner party by asserting that Hitler had, after all, got it right; and some might find his view of Mrs Thatcher a little eccentric: 'quite bewitching, as Eva Peron must have been'. Most will probably be irritated by his continual whining about how poor he was, while nightly gambling what for them would be a fortune - and mostly losing. And his former constituents will certainly not warm to his critical view of them. The political aspects of these diaries are not as riveting as in the previous volume but even at this level he is a diarist of note, and if others (Gyles Brandreth to name only one) have written better diaries about Westminster, Clark's self-revelation not as a political heavy-weight, but as a cad and a bounder of the first water will always engage our interest. (Kirkus UK)