Bookbenchers: Matthew Hancock MP

This week, our bookbencher is Matthew Hancock, the Conservative MP for West Suffolk.

Which book’s on your bedside table at the moment?

Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-1945, by Max Hastings. In biography, taking on Churchill is about as big as it gets. Many people thought that Roy Jenkins’ masterful work, with its insights drawn from first-hand experience at the pinnacle of politics, would be the last word on the subject for at least a decade. Yet by focussing on the years that define our greatest Prime Minister in the popular consciousness, and no doubt in history, Max Hastings has brought a fresh eye to the ‘finest years’. Finest years they may have been for stirring rhetoric and resolution in the face of adversity. But Hastings achieves more by getting below the surface myth of Churchill as a historical icon, and describes the complex, often lonely, politics of leading Britain.