David Runciman

Like many​ recent political memoirists, Gordon Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what it was like...

One of​ the better arguments for Britain’s leaving the EU was that it might reinvigorate and liberate national politics, stifled for too long by the absence of real choice at election time. The EU is a legalistic and treaty-based political institution designed to take some of the heat out of domestic politics. That left people complaining that the EU was generating all the heat....

Inevitably,​ the first thing I did when I got my copy of the one-volume edition of The Benn Diaries (Hutchinson, £30) was to look up Jeremy Corbyn in the index. He appears about as often as you’d expect, 15 times in total, scattered at regular intervals across 24 years, from 1983 until 2007. (The diaries end in 2009, five years before Benn’s death.) Corbyn rarely shows up...

Getting through Brexit successfully will probably require a certain amount of insouciance. As so often in politics, the roles seem to have been handed out the wrong way round. May would have been a far better person than Cameron or Osborne to lead the Remain campaign, and had she done so Britain would almost certainly still be in the EU. But either Cameron or Osborne might do a far better job at negotiating Britain’s departure. What is the Brexit negotiation if not a game? If May is determined to treat it as something else, it could end badly for everyone involved.