Summer reading: the books we’re taking on holiday

Kirstie Allsopp, TV presenter

I’m in the Bahamas with my family and have brought Gyles Brandreth’s Philip: The Final Portrait. It’s bloody brilliant, totally inspiring, so good at making one think, “Stop whingeing and find someone who needs help.” Also the discretion and stoicism of the man are an excellent lesson for us all. Gyles obviously adored Prince Philip and it’s a joy to read a book that comes from a perspective of fondness. There are whole pages I want to read to the kids and stick to the fridge.

Emily Mortimer read EM Forster in Florence

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Emily Mortimer, actress and director

I have been in Florence, where I was reading Aspects of the Novel by EM Forster, which is brilliant for anyone who’s interested in storytelling and how to construct a narrative and do it with good taste and heart. I am now in Cleveland, Ohio, reading Dear Writer, Dear Actress, Anton Chekhov and Olga Knipper’s letters to each other. She was the leading lady for whom he wrote such roles as Masha in The Three Sisters, Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, Yelena in Uncle Vanya and Arkadina in The Seagull.

She was in Moscow acting in his plays and being a star while he was in Yalta suffering from TB. Their letters are amazing and very funny. She longs to be in an intense romance — she wishes she was pale and skinny and interesting and can’t get away from the fact that she’s healthy and solid and rosy cheeked.

She keeps sending photos of herself asking what he thinks of them and he’ll write deeply annoying things back like, “You look like someone studying dentistry.” Or she’ll try to ask existential questions like, “What is life?” and he’ll write back saying, “Life is a carrot.”

I also have Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson with me. It’s a love story and a debut novel, beautifully written. I very much recommend the Midwest of America as a destination. It’s beautiful and calm and everyone’s friendly.

Rory Stewart, former MP

This year I am on holiday in Jordan, with some of the time in Wadi Rum. My first holiday book is Jan-Werner Müller’s Democracy Rules, an extraordinarily timely investigation of what is happening to our increasingly fragile democracies, from the US to India. It is learned but clearly written, and always intelligent, open-minded and morally engaged.

I’ll also take Ursula K Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, a classic fantasy for young adults, deftly written, touched with profundity and a commitment to crafting the texture and shape of a meaningful human life. It also has a fine ancient dragon.

The last one I’m reading is English Pastoral by James Rebanks. He is a deeply committed farmer making a small place on difficult soil produce magic, and a writer of real talent and literary range. He proves in his words and daily action that our landscape need be neither an industrialised food factory nor a wilderness, but that farming can flourish beautifully alongside nature.

Emma Bridgewater, potter

I’ll be going to Lincolnshire with a friend next week for a jolly, to look at churches and stay in some funny places. I live in Norfolk and often drive through Lincolnshire, but never stop to explore. I’ll be finishing Darkling by Laura Beatty, which is about that almost unimaginable dreadfulness, the Civil War, that extraordinary moment when England tore itself apart.

The book tells you it can happen anywhere at any time, and there is a very good female protagonist, Brilliana Harvey, who’s a Puritan lady in a castle with an absent husband and a growing family who does melancholy and loneliness and introspection; it’s my kind of beach reading. It’s extraordinary and terrifying. The business of civil war and the texture of it and the way women cope is fascinating to me.

Another book I’ll take is I Couldn’t Love You More by Esther Freud. I hugely admire her writing, and the book explores the story of her mother’s life with her father, Lucian Freud. I’ll probably also take with me Hannah Dawson’s very good Penguin Book of Feminist Writing. The preface of that is a very good reminder that we should be more active in our feminist principles and it has led me to say and do things I would never have said a few years ago.

I’ll also take Meg Rosoff’s The Great Godden since I am her biggest fan. I have a fantasy that she writes her books about me and how I live now. When I opened it I felt as if I had landed straight back in I Capture the Castle.

Tom Holland, historian

I’ll be going to Cornwall to a place not far from Port Quin, where I used to go as a child. It’s where we’ve been going for the past 20 years and, as every year, it will be a large family occasion. It’s been a measure of continuity because we even managed to go last year.

I’ll be taking an advance copy of Sebastian Faulks’s new book, Snow Country, which I can’t wait to read. He and I play cricket in the Authors XI and he always gets me a copy of his forthcoming book to read on holiday — it’s a great arrangement.

I’ll also be taking Robert Peal’s Meet the Georgians, a first book by a man who’s a deputy head teacher in west London, which I was sent a copy of. I know nothing about it, but it looks great fun.

And finally I’ll be rereading Great Expectations. Dickens is my favourite novelist and I reread his books every 20 years or so. During the winter lockdown I did a fantastic Dickens walk around London with my friend Helen Thompson, who’s a big Dickens expert, and that has rekindled my interest.

Maureen Lipman, actress

I will be taking to Malta Shuggie Bain because my daughter and Rula Lenska told me it was dazzling and I believe them where I might not have believed the reviews. Also Shouting in the Evenings by James Hayes, a memoir by the actor who has been in most of the National Theatre’s plays over the past 50 years. I saw it on Gyles Brandreth’s shelf and said, “I’d love to read that.” When I got home I looked at the cover and it said, “A helluva good read — Maureen Lipman,” leading me to believe I have read it but just forgotten. So I will jolly well read it again. Third book would be Kiss Myself Goodbye by Ferdinand Mount. I am halfway through this startling memoir of the many lives of his Aunt Munca. It is “a voyage into a vanished moral world” and she is one of life’s unforgettable characters.

Joan Bakewell

I’m devouring the three autobiographies by Deborah Levy: Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and the latest, Real Estate. That’s because they are like a delicious meal, by turns spicy, juicy and with an overall sweetness of temperament . . . Fetching up in gorgeous places, it makes even the grim ones exciting. Ideal reading for a woman on her own.

Antonia Fraser, writer

My traditional summer holiday in Cornwall to which I look forward all year (hospitable daughter and family) is dominated by my reading. This takes place in two settings. One is the long but scenically beautiful railway journey to and from Land’s End. The other is the bench on the bluff looking out to sea. In theory you should be able to see America. In the days of Trump I preferred to keep my eyes on my book, although nowadays I might wave in the direction of Joe Biden.

Since I am a notoriously quick reader, the sort who annoys fellow passengers by apparently reading a book between station stops, I need help to carry all I intend to read. Thus in both settings I am heavily dependent on my loyal friend Kitty Kindle, who carries with her effortlessly, for example, the whole of Scott, Dickens, Trollope and Ian Rankin as well as new books for the season.

Then, just in case Kitty Kindle runs out of steam (this has only happened once, but it was a disaster on a long plane journey), I take a real book. This year on Kindle I shall probably allow myself Ivanhoe (my favourite Scott) yet again and the hardback book will be Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism by Rosemary Hill, the author of the admirable biography of Pugin.

On Kindle I shall continue to read Amartya Sen’s fascinating memoir Home in the World, giving me a new perspective on Anglo-India, as well as dipping into the poems of Tagore, in a Penguin edition, to which he has alerted me, for the first time.

James Blunt, singer

Because I’m not reading anything right now — I can read, but I try not to — as a Gen Z, or whatever I may be, I have my phone instead. I spend most of my time trawling Twitter for the one or two people who may still remember me, or reading the same platform to affirm my theories that the vaccine gave me a semi by the sea, that Covid was developed by Hillary Clinton, and that UFOs are just billionaires from other planets.
Additional reporting: Jade Cuttle