Noises off: The Duncan Diaries are more amusing, and more valuable, than one might have expected.

His remarks about Johnson demonstrate the latter’s remarkable capacity to win round, even impress, critics who have lost all patience with him.

From Walpole to Johnson, the rude, original vigour of the Prime Minister and the Commons have survived

A new study by Anthony Seldon of the office of Prime Minister gives too little credit to the many among its 55 holders whom he dismisses as failures.

How to advise Lord North, or Heath, or Thatcher, or Johnson

A new volume of essays puts special advisers in historical context, and suggests the Cabinet has been marginalised by a succession of over-mighty PMs.

Oborne condemns Johnson as a liar – and cannot understand why many voters believe the Prime Minister is telling the truth

This book exemplifies the addiction to indignant moralising which blinds so many political commentators to the true nature of their own country.

Peel increased the burden of taxation on the rich – perhaps Sunak and Johnson will too

Dale’s new volume of brief lives of all 55 Prime Ministers since 1721 brings only some of them to life.

Britain’s relationship with the EU: no love affair, followed by a bad marriage and a stormy divorce

In his new history, Stephen Wall describes the unbridgeable divide on Europe into which any Prime Minister is in danger of tumbling.

Cardwell is loyal to May and Brokenshire, but does not tell us much about the Prime Minister’s people

This account of three and a half years as a special adviser confirms how trivial and transitory the role can be.

The fullest account yet written of Sunak the rising star

Tories will read the story of his ascent to high office with enormous pleasure – for it amounts to a vindication of the United Kingdom.

From Disraeli to Johnson, the Left has never understood the Right, and Fawcett shows us why

A magisterial survey of conservatism since the French Revolution brings home how various it is, and how impossible to reduce to an ideology.

This hatchet man in a hurry casts no new light on Johnson, except to show him as a vulnerable child

An excellent book about the Prime Minister has just been published. Unfortunately it is in German.

Swire’s diaries help show how Johnson entered Downing Street, and has so far managed to remain there

His capacity to win some of his severest critics round, and persuade them of his “greatness of soul”, helps explain his success.

Dale fails to realise that the right to be rude lies at the heart of the British idea of freedom

But his new book conveys very well what is wrong with social media, and how it might be put right.

Finkelstein shows that moderate, decent, pragmatic, intelligent conservatism is alive and well

His columns from The Times are informed by his experience of what works, and more importantly, what doesn’t work.

The people in whose name liberals act are absent from Applebaum’s defence of liberalism

Much of this book is true, and the author does not pretend fully to understand what is happening. And yet I think her pessimism is overdone.

Bevin, the working-class John Bull who stood up to Stalin and has no successors in today’s Labour Party

Andrew Adonis’s new biography of “the first of a new breed of ‘common man’ who would manage the British state” and became one of the great Foreign Secretaries.