Edward Stourton (2026)

A view of Donald Trump’s presidency through the lens of American history.

Stourton’s premise arises from surprise: when people frequently describe Trump as an anomaly and a unique threat to democracy, is that actually true? – or were there precedents? He sets out to show that many of Trump’s ideas are deeply embedded in American history, arising repeatedly in similar guises.

Many of the connections have been made before, notably with President Andrew Jackson’s view that politics comes before, and must sometimes supercede, the law. But Stourton has a journalist’s ear for subtle echoes, and surprisingly (to me) includes Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the same sequence of presidents willing to ignore or circumvent the established readings of the law and constitution as he pushed the New Deal forward.

I found strongest arguments to be those about religion. To the question of how religious voters support a clearly irreligious president so fervently, Stourton reaches back almost to the foundation of America, to the early Puritan colony of Massachusetts, where the theme of religious liberty didn’t mean what we might expect today. The Puritans left England to seek liberty for themselves, but once established in their own realm proceeded to reproduce the intolerance they themselves had fled. The later Madisonian view that religion belongs to the private sphere, untouched by and untouching of the state, therefore sits alongside a completely contrary view that the state should have a controlling religious faction and orthodoxy – and the latter view seems to have recently become dominant, much to the surprise of outside observers but perhaps not as historically anomalous as it at first appears.

In the epilogue Stourton returns to the often surprising differences between American and European (and especially British) views. It raises the question: was the post-war consensus on human rights and peaceful co-existence actually sincere, based in an idea of progress? – or was it adopted purely as a response to the shocks of the war? Has it simply taken eighty years for the old power politics to re-emerge, and were we foolish to think it might be otherwise? I hope not.

4/5. Finished Sunday 7 June, 2026.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Donna Tartt (1992)

The book that gave rise to the whole genre of “dark academia”, and a well-crafted tale of self-absorbtion within a closed-off community of scholarship. That kind of self-absorbtion is hardly unusual in academia of course (speaking as an academic) – although it seldom leads to murder.

The structure, pacing, and writing are all impeccable, and readily let a reader picture the sleepy New England college campus setting (inspired by Tarte’s alma mater Bennington College). It starts with a retrospective, the narrator reflecting on the murder around which the plot revolves before changing the his first-person linear narrative. The characters are well-drawn if perhaps a little stereotypical: the narrator is a working-class outsider who finds his way to a selective college and the company of a group of far more wealthy and self-contained students, whose entire academic experience is orchestrated by a professor with a deep and charismatic commitment to the relevance of the classics to the modern world. They will end up turning on each other under the pressure of the murders (plural) that they commit: the first in a pursuit of Dionysian ecstasy gone wrong, and the second to cover-up the first.

The book is written to almost obscure the time in which it happens: I wondered for a long time whether it was set in the 1920s, before I eventually decided it was more probably in the 1980s. Perhaps that’s a comment on liberal arts college life, of study set apart from the outside world. Not quite the academia I recognise, but as an act of world-building it’s superb, and as a plot it’s well-observed and well-crafted with plenty of twists and uncertainties.

5/5. Finished Sunday 7 June, 2026.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)