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How Euan Blair dodged the curse of Prime Ministers’ children As the eldest Blair becomes a millionaire entrepreneur, Harry Mount looks at how other Downing Street offspring have fared 20 January 2021 • 7:18pm Sons and daughters: Euan Blair, centre, and left to right, Mark and Carol Thatcher, Randolph Churchill, James Major and model Emma Noble, Meriel Douglas-Home My God! Can Euan Blair really be worth £73 million? That’s even more than his moneybags dad, Tony, who’s got a mere £60 million to his name. Master Blair has made the money out of his apprenticeship company, Multiverse...

RADICAL WORDSWORTH by Jonathan Bate (Collins £25, 608pp) ‘THE GIANT Wordsworth — God love him!’ wrote his friend, admirer and fellow poet Coleridge. It is a tribute that is lovingly and enthusiastically endorsed by leading literary scholar Jonathan Bate in this magnificent biography, my top pick of the year. Wordsworth forged a connection to the natural world that now might seem old hat, but here we see not only how radically it differed from what had gone before, but how relevant it still is. Bate lets us delight in much of the original verse — ‘In all shapes/He found a secret and...

This year has been a strange one for the world of books. Covid meant that bookshops were closed for much of the time, which meant that readers were denied the joy of browsing, and the affiliated pleasure of judging books by their covers. In turn, we authors were denied most of the usual ego-boosts normally associated with a new book: no launch parties, no literary festivals, no search, fruitless or otherwise, for your book on the shelves of Waterstones, no trips to out-of-the-way radio studios for a two-minute interview on BBC Radio Umbrage. The upside of it all was that more books were read ...

The Prospect editorial—a new year and renewed purpose Time to take stock in the battle between enlightenment and its opposite Basking in Trump, Brexit and various shades of nationalist nastiness in Europe, Vladimir Putin gave a provocative interview. “The liberal idea,” he told the Financial Times in 2019, had “outlived its purpose.” Hostility to multiculturalism had rendered it obsolete. You might be a red-blooded socialist or a communitarian conservative, but if you’re reading Prospect, you’re unlikely to take instruction in political theory from the man in the Kremlin. Thi...