A WATERSTONES BEST POLITICS BOOK OF 2023

'Passionate, clever, and often very funny' Marina Hyde

'A wonderful meditation on populism, nationalism, politics and truth' Rory Stewart

We live in an age of fury and confusion. A new crisis erupts before the last one has finished: financial crisis, Brexit, pandemic, war in Ukraine, inflation, strikes. Prime Ministers come and go but politics stays divided and toxic.

It is tempting to switch off the news, tune out and hope things will get back to normal. Except, this is the new normal, and our democracy can only work if enough people stay engaged without getting enraged. But how?

To answer that question, award-winning journalist Rafael Behr takes the reader on a personal journey from despair at the state of politics to hope that there is a better way of doing things, with insights drawn from three decades as a political commentator and foreign correspondent.

"Behr is a brilliant stylist whose writing is full of quotable sentences and sharp analogies." - Guardian

"[Behr] writes with elegance and honesty and his judgements are balanced." - Observer

"Behr is a lucid writer, peppering his prose with moments of rich reporting. He enjoys playing with concepts and neologisms." - Times Literary Supplement

"An elegant diagnosis of the chronic condition facing contemporary politics - the strains on democracy - and a prescription for restoring its health." - Irish Examiner

"both a cool, irresistibly argued analysis of Britain's lurch towards popularism culminating the country's sleepwalk to Brexit, and a memoir about how the country's politics turned being Jewish from a private, incidental thing into a frontline issue." - Jewish Chronicle