Books For Father's Day

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The sort of thing you wake up to on Father's Day in this house looks like this, though the books are all more or less the same size.

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"Amazing Tales for making Men out of Boys" is compendium of stories that we all used to know: Captain Scott; Sir John Moore; the Birkinhead; Rorke's Drift; but adds some new stories: the Penlee Lifeboat, for example; and some worth adding to the canon: Dien Bien Phu. These are the stories which evoke manliness and heroism.

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"Madresfield" is the story of a house and family, best known nowadays as the inspiration for Brideshead Revisited, but of genuine interest in its own right.

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"Terror and Consent" is the hard one. "He sets out with clarity and courage the first really comprehensive analysis of the struggle against terror" according to Tony Blair, and, for one, I agree with the ex-PM: as far as I've got in the book so far, he does.

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Inspiring, interesting, important: it's hard to better than that in three books.