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CPF Summer Reading List!


This July we asked CPF members 'If you could recommend just one book for others in the CPF to read over the summer, what would it be?'


Thank you to everyone who participated. The following authors were each mentioned at least three times by different contributors:



  • Laura Dodsworth: A State of Fear: How the UK Government Weaponised Fear During the COVID-19 Pandemic (May 2021)

  • Penny Mordaunt and Chris Lewis: Greater: Britain after The Storm (May 2021)

  • George Orwell: 1984 / Animal Farm / England Your England

  • Isabel Hardman: Why We Get the Wrong Politicians (Sept 2018)

  • Iain Dale: The Prime Ministers (Nov 2020)

  • Andrew Roberts: Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Oct 2018)

  • Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged (1957)

  • Niccolo Machiavelli: The Prince (1532; the best modern edition is by Skinner and Price)

The following books were mentioned twice:

  • Matt Ridley: How Innovation Works

  • Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay: Cynical Theories

  • Tom Holland: Dominion: the making of the Western Mind

  • Robert Greene: The 48 Laws of Power

  • Captain Tom: Tomorrow will be a good day / Captain Tom Moore

  • Suzanne Heywood: What does Jeremy think?

  • John Stuart Mill: On Liberty

  • Delia Owens: Where the Crawdads Sing

  • Roger Scruton: How to be a Conservative

  • Geoff Norcott: Where Did I Go Right? How The Left Lost Me

  • Friedrich Hayek: The road to serfdom

  • Robert Tombs: This sovereign Isle. Britain in and out of Europe

  • Tom Bower: Boris Johnson: The Gambler

  • Alan Duncan: In the thick of it. The private diaries of a Minister

  • Michael Shellenberger: Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

  • Gregory Wrightstone: Inconvenient Facts - The science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know


CPF Chairman John Penrose MP suggested Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty

CPF Manager Dr John Hayward suggested Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction


“Published 2015, this reads like critique of 2020 and challenges its readers to become more actively open-minded, more ‘dragonfly-eyed’ and more committed to personal growth.”

2 Comments


David Johnson
Aug 13, 2022

I wasn’t a member then but I’d recommend Chums by Simon Kuper. You couldn’t make it up.

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David Dundas
Aug 19, 2021

I don't recall being asked this question; if I had, I would have suggested "How to avoid a climate disaster" by Bill Gates

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