MUST READS  | Daily Mail Online

For The Record by David Cameron (William Collins £10.99, 752 pp)

When the hardback edition of David Cameron’s memoirs was published last year, Brexit dominated the headlines.

Since then, he writes, the coronavirus pandemic ‘has made me read the contents of this book, and consequently my time in power, in a different light’.

His introduction emphasises the achievements of his time in office, suggesting that the measures he put in place should have left the Government well prepared to cope with Covid-19.

Engagingly written and laced with entertaining anecdotes about such characters as Angela Merkel, whom Cameron once had to heave over a barbed-wire fence, For The Record also gives a moving account of Cameron’s deep love for his wife and children, and the heart-wrenchingly sad death of his eldest son, Ivan.

I Love the Bones of You by Christopher Eccleston (Simon & Schuster £9.99, 336 pp)

The relationships of fathers and sons are rarely discussed, but here the actor Christopher Eccleston details his own with his father Ronnie, who was one of the great formative influences of his life.

Ronnie was born into a working-class Salford family and loved words, but he was a complicated man, capable of terrifying rages.

Inheriting that complexity from a father whom he loved and sometimes feared, Eccleston channelled it into roles such as Nicky Hutchinson in Our Friends In The North, Doctor Who and his stage performance of Macbeth.

With raw courage and honesty, this memoir recounts his struggle with anorexia, his breakdown at 52 and his anguish at his father’s decline into dementia, but tells of the enduring sweetness of family life as a son and a father himself.

Who Dares Wins by Dominic Sandbrook (Penguin £14.99, 976 pp)

‘Such is Britain’s position today, every turn for the worse compounded by a very British disbelief that things could really have become so bad.’

Margaret Thatcher’s early years as Prime Minister would shape Britain for decades, and Dominic Sandbrook’s masterly account begins with the storming of the Iranian embassy siege by the SAS (whose regimental motto gives the book its title).

Sandbrook sets his analysis of the era’s knotty political issues against a richly detailed narrative of everyday life in the early 1980s — Terry And June, wine bars and Prince Charles’s engagement to Diana.

Evocative and thought-provoking, this is a vivid portrait of a turning-point in our island story.