Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia by Robert Lacey (Hutchinson, £20; Buy this book; 404pp) Since Lacey’s first analysis of Saudi Arabia about 20 years ago in The Kingdom, a great deal of sand has shifted under the feet of the House of Saud. Lacey has spent three years sifting it. Given that the society of Saudi Arabia does not function like a Western democracy, it is still startling to read of the complexities and contradictions of a state in which technology and ancient religious beliefs share the country’s common and sovereign space. Lacey depicts a society painfully adapting to ideals it once rejected and ideas that are not wholly consistent with its traditions.
Second Opinion: A Doctor’s Dispatches from the Inner City by Theodore Dalrymple (Monday Books, £14.99; Buy this book; 321pp) Dalrymple’s quizzical tone of enraged disgust echoes the bitter conservatism of Bog-Standard Britain, by the political columnist Quentin Letts. Dalrymple’s experience at the sharp end is as a hospital consultant and a prison doctor. In these collected columns from The Spectator, his is not so much the voice of the man on the Clapham omnibus as the de haut en bas drawl from the man in the BMW driving through the squalor of urban lowlife. He seems to dislike his patients as much as he despairs at the state services and bureaucracy that defeat his and their attempts to survive at the base level of modern British life.
Something Sensational to Read in the Train: The Diary of a Lifetime by Gyles Brandreth (John Murray, £25; Buy this book; 706pp) In the annals of political memoir, Gyles Daubeny Brandreth’s will not rank up there with the autobiography of, oh, let’s say John Nott. There’s dead and there’s deathless; there’s also breathless, which is a fair description of Brandreth’s dash through the media, then the legislature as a Tory MP and back — after losing his seat but not his wit — to the media. The diary recalls, in tone, The Diary of a Nobody crossed with the diaries of Chips Channon, the political flâneur. Readers may suppose that this diary, begun in 1959, has been of the most consuming interest to Brandreth himself — judging by the writer’s delight in his own work.