Britain | Publishing

Political biographies are dislodging celebrity books

Dysfunctional politics, it turns out, is rather entertaining

Sasha Swire laid a bestseller

JAMES DAUNT used to grimace when another dreary politician’s memoirs hit the shelves. “You would unpack the worthy brick that came from the publishers and then three months later you would put them all back in a box to go back whence they came,” says the boss of Waterstones, a bookstore chain. The minutiae of long-ago cabinet meetings left the nation strangely unmoved. “Norman Fowler’s memoirs didn’t race out the door.”

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Aide memoir”

Torment of the Uyghurs and the global crisis in human rights

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