Paris Agreement

Paris Climate Accord

The Rosy Wealth of June

Unleashing Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit (Non-fiction) by Craig Oliver

Hardback:  You could unleash demons of which ye know not. - David Cameron on being asked to sum up the argument against a referendum

Let go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it. - The Fool, King Lear, Act II, Scene IV

So what was it about?  People's emotions matter even when they don't seem wholly rational...  There is, among a section of the population, a kind of hysteria, a contagious mourning of the kind that I remember in 1997 after the death of the Princess of Wales.  It is not about the EU, of course... - Boris Johnson, writing ten days after the referendum

As David Cameron's director of Politics and communications, Craig Oliver was in the room at every key moment during the EU referendum - the biggest political event in the UK since World War Two.

Craig Oliver worked with all the players, including David Cameron, George Osbourne, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Theresa May and Peter Mandelson.

Unleashing Demons (2016) is based on his extensive notes, detailing everything from the decision to call a referendum, to the subsequent civil war in the Conservative Party and the aftermath of the shocking result.

This is raw history at its very best, packed with enthralling detail and colourful anecdotes from behind the closed doors of the campaign that changed British history.

About the author:  Before entering 10 Downing Street in 2011 as Director of Politics and Communications, Craig Oliver was an award-winning journalist.  His roles included editing the BBC's News at Six and Ten, Controller of BBC World Service and Executive Editor of ITV's flagship news programmes.  He has three daughters, lives in London and was recently knighted.

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Killing For Company: The Case of Dennis Nilsen (True Crime) by Brian Masters

Paperback:  I have now a guilt and punishment complex.  I am convinced that I deserve everything that a court can throw at me. - D A Nilsen, 13 April 1983

On February 9th 1983 Dennis Nilsen was arrested at his Muswell Hill home, after human remains had been identified as the cause of blocked drains.

Within days he had confessed to fifteen gruesome murders over a period of four years.  His victims, all young homosexual men, had never been reported missing.

Brian Masters, with Nilsen's full cooperation, has produced a unique study of a serial killer's mind, revealing the disturbing psychology of a mass murderer in Killing for Company (1995).

"This has been in many ways a disturbing book to write, and some will no doubt find it an unpleasant one to read.  Dennis Andrew Nilsen, having started life unremarkably enough in a fishing community in Scotland, at the age of thirty-seven admitted to the wilful murder of fifteen men over a period of four years, thus becoming the biggest multiple killer in British criminal history.  This book attempts to show how such a calamity could occur.

The courts have already dealt with Nilsen by imprisoning him for life.  In this there can be but scant comfort for the families of his victims, who must forever wonder why their sons were cut down before they had time to grapple with life's problems in their own way, in order to satisfy the obsessive needs of a stranger who has been adjudged sane.  With this in mind, there can be no ambiguity about the moral response to his crimes.

By examining in detail Nilsen's life and attitudes, his emotions and reflexes, it might be possible to reach an understanding, albeit a scrappy one, of one dark and mysterious aspect of the human condition.  That, at least, is my purpose."  - Brian Masters, London, 1984

About the author:  Brian Masters' work is eclectic, to say the least.  Brian Masters (born 1939) is a British writer best known for his biographies of mass murderers.  He has also written about the British aristocracy and worked as a translator.  He was a contributor to the Spectator, the Standard and Book & Bookmen.

Masters grew up in a prefab on the Old Kent Road, Southwark to a hunchback mother with a weak chest and an illegitimate no hoper father.  During his adolescence, after he asked to interview television personality Gilbert Harding for the school magazine he had launched, Harding became close to him, and functioned as a mentor.  Masters was apparently quite unfazed when Harding asked to watch him bathe.

The family having moved to Wales in a vain hope of improving his mother's health, Masters read French Literature and Philosophy at University of Wales, Cardiff where he gained a first in 1961. Briefly a teacher in France (as part of his degree), he worked for a time as a travel guide organising educational tours for American students and then wrote books on French writers such as Molière (1970) and Camus, among others, without any pretence at them having any real originality.  The publisher Anthony Blond interested him in a book on the public's dreams about the Royal Family, which was the first of several books by Masters on the British aristocracy.

Masters is best known for his books about serial killers, written with the co-operation of the subjects or their families.  Masters corresponded with Dennis Nilsen from shortly after his arrest in February 1983, and met him in prison without having felt the slightest unease during their time together.  His book contains writings by Nilsen, and Masters considers various theories which attempt to explain Nilsen's actions.  Masters reaches no final conclusion on the essential unknowability of the human mind.  Masters was accused of being overly sympathetic to Nilsen at the time his book first appeared, a view he rejects in his memoir.

Following the book on Nilsen, Masters wrote The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer and She Must Have Known: The Trial of Rosemary West. (Source:  Wikipedia)

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