MP Vince Cable: My six best books
VINCE CABLE, 72, served as Business Secretary from 2010-15 and was MP for Twickenham for 18 years before losing his seat in May this year.
Vince Cable's book, After The Storm: The World Economy & Britain’s Economic Futures is out now
THE HEART OF THE MATTER by Graham Greene Vintage, £8.99
A wonderful writer. When I started reading good quality literature in my late teens, I wanted to read everything he’d done.
This is his deepest and best book. The main character is a Catholic tortured by competing loves and it’s good at evoking wartime west Africa.
AN OFFICER AND A SPY by Robert Harris Arrow, £7.99
I read more fiction when I was Secretary of State than at any other stage of my life as I needed something to help me switch off. Harris writes thoughtful page-turners and I’ve read them all.
This one is about the Dreyfus scandal.
BIRDSONG by Sebastian Faulks Vintage, £8.99
I found this the most powerful of all the war novels. It’s so well researched.
It’s a different take in that a lot of it concerns the tunnelling in the First World War, which is described in graphic, frightening terms.
A FINE BALANCE by Rohinton Mistry Faber, £8.99
There are many good novels in English by Indian writers and this story of a family captures a harrowing period in modern Indian history that rings true to me.
I’ve been going to India for about 50 years because my late wife was Indian and I have deep affection for the country.
YOUNG STALIN by Simon Sebag Montefiore W&N, £9.99
Montefiore brings Stalin alive and reminds you how awful he was. He was a gangster and a psychopath.
We tend to think of Stalin in his “prime” but this is how he worked his way up from bank robber to the Soviet Union’s most powerful man.
RETURN OF A KING by William Dalrymple Bloomsbury, £9.99
This is a history of Afghanistan and describes the role of the British in the 19th century, a tragic history.
It’s beautifully written, well researched and makes you understand why everybody has found it so difficult to operate there.
Vince Cable's book After The Storm: The World Economy & Britain’s Economic Future (Atlantic, £18.99) is out now (expressbookshop.co.uk).