As it's been a holiday weekend, I've been reading a non-economics book (Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence, which is great). So no new reviews from me here. The newspapers decided not to have lots of reviews of economics and business books either, but I did spot plenty of reviews of Philip Blond's Red Tory – in the Telegraph, Independent, Guardian, Times and of course the FT.

According to Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian:

Blond has intrigued and infuriated in equal measure – and his book
will do likewise. Blond is a man for big ideas, sweeping statements and
the grand historical overview. His key selling point is the way he
bundles together the unexpected: a passion for social justice alongside
an instinctive social conservatism. He wants the family back but he
also wants to get rid of the gross inequality of the last two decades.

The
consequence is that he has no obvious audience, no ready constituency
for his ideas. Everyone at some point in his argument is going to get
uncomfortable; ……..

But
such is the bland predictability of British politics, the territory of
managerialised soundbite, that the appetite continues for Blond's
intellectual equivalent of a firework display.

Judging from the number of reviews of the book, this last observation is spot on.