Culture

This week, Jamie Reed, the Labour MP for Copeland and Cumbria and shadow health minister, is in the hot seat. He is big on books about American politics, and reads poetry occasionally. 1) Which books are at your bedside table at the moment? Most books now on my iPad... but Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is always present on the bedside table. Have just begun – finally – Team of Rivals. 2) Which book would you read to your children? They have different tastes. The Fantastic Mr Fox is always loved, along with The Hobbit. 3) Which literary character would you most like to be? Nick Clegg... or Nick Carraway. 4) Which book do you think best sums up 'now'?

I’m off for my annual digital detox: no ConservativeHome, no PoliticsHome, just my wife’s family home in Stockholm and swapping my Blackberry for a primitive mobile with a battery that lasts a week. But before I sign off completely, I’d like to abuse my position to ask CoffeeHousers for book recommendations. I’ve done this for three years now, and each year the results pretty much give me a reading list for the next 12 months. I’ve only now finished the last of summer 2010’s suggestions (Exodus, by Leon Uris.) I’m midway through Max Hastings brilliant All Hell Let Loose, which I’m interspersing with the restored World at War on DVD (a Pete Hoskin recommendation). They go brilliantly together.

“My shame was my father wasn’t there,” says Nick Makoha, the London poet who represented Uganda at the recent Poetry Parnassus. This frank vulnerability is at the core of his first collection of poetry and his new theatre performance, ‘My Father and other Superheroes.’ Uganda is a source of tension for Makoha as both the place of his birth but also a place he fled, a place from which he feels distant. “Most people are from somewhere else,” he says. “So the story of the exile isn’t the minority, we’re the majority. Look at T.S. Eliot, by all rights and purposes he belongs to America. He liked French poets, Italian poets.

Thanks to Twitter for alerting me to this small act of rebellion: Taken outside the display windows at Smiths, @HypnoPeter As Fleur Macdonald wrote a couple of weeks ago, it is a mystery 'why people might want to read it [Fifty Shades of Grey] rather than Réage’s The Story of O, Bataille’s The Eye or any back issue of Cosmopolitan. And that's to name but a few, and none of the masters like Henry Miller. As the Samizdat above tells you, assuming that you are in the market, go forth and find good smut. Please, anything but 'it'.

Tamsin Greig is so busy at the moment that Debbie Aldridge, the character she plays in The Archers, has to spend most of her time in Hungary. Star of TV shows like Black Books, Green Wing and Episodes, Tamsin Greig is also an accomplished stage actress and is about to reprise her role in Jumpy at The Duke of York in the West End. She tells us about her love for Seamus Heaney and Jackie Magazine. 1) What are you reading at the moment?      Under The Same Stars by Tim Lott and Collected Poems by Wendy Cope 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Jackie magazine 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?  The Road by Cormac McCarthy 4) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books.

Richard Ford published his debut novel A Piece of My Heart in 1976.  But it was The Sportswriter — which introduced the world to Frank Bascombe, and other marginalised characters trapped on the edge of the American Dream — that distinguished Ford as a serious literary force. The two books that followed, Independence Day, which won him the Pulitzer prize in fiction, and Lay of The Land, completed the Frank Bascombe trilogy. Canada, his seventh novel, begins in Montana in 1960. It’s narrated by Dell Parsons, the son of a retired Air Force pilot, and a schoolteacher. The novel begins when Dell’s parents, Bev and Neeva, are sent to jail for robbing a bank, leaving him and his twin- sister, Berner, to fend for themselves.

Any idea what an Ouroboros is? It's not the name of the cloud hanging over London at the moment but, according to Will Wilkinson, in his review of Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality on the Economist blog, a perfect symbol for the ‘progressive master narrative’ championed by a new technocratic coterie (which also counts Paul Krugman among its members). An ancient image of a snake consuming its own extremity, the Ouroboros is a fitting symbol for ‘progressives dizzy from chasing their tails’.

One of the great tragedies of political history is that the foresight, clarity and prescience of Enoch Powell are too often viewed though the murky prism of his notorious Rivers of Blood speech. His kindness, courtesy, love of his family, nation and the House of Commons can be so easily overlooked. And his dry and sometimes mischievous sense of humour almost ignored.  Enoch at 100 is a wonderful and accessible book which gives us a fair and accurate perspective of the man that so many of us genuinely liked and respected. It is a compilation of personal anecdotes by those who knew him well and others who give real insight into a man whose scarily logical mind was well ahead of its time. The anecdotes, particularly, by his wife Pamela, are both moving and revealing.

This week’s Bookbencher is Stewart Jackson, the Conservative MP for Peterborough. He tells us which Chilean communist poet he read recently, which children’s classic has stayed with him since childhood and which three books he would save from a burning British library. 1) Which books are at your bedside table at the moment? All Hell Let Loose by Max Hastings, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell and Cyber War by Richard A Clarke 2) Which book would you read to children? The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier — published in 1956. I read it as a child and never forgot it! 3) Which literary character would you most like to be?