Rory Stewart

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the forces of resistance were disparate and divided mujahideen groups, as interested in fighting each other and competing for Western arms as opposing the Russians. The exception was Ahmed Shah Massoud, the military strategist and political operator who solidified the resistance and undermined the Russian occupation by leading its members to a series of defensive victories. Sandy Gall was embedded with Massoud during Soviet offences and reported on the war in Afghanistan for a number of years. He has now written an illuminating biography of this charismatic guerrilla commander, which contains excerpts from the surviving volumes of Massoud's diaries. Massoud's prolific diary-keeping was little known during his lifetime, and his entries detail crucial moments in his life and throw fascinating light on his struggles, both in the resistance and in his personal life. Born into an ostensibly liberalising Afghanistan in the 1960s, Massoud ardently opposed communism and Mohammed Daoud, Afghanistan's puppet leader. He quickly rose to prominence and distinguished himself by coordinating the defence of the Panjshir Valley against repeated Soviet offensives. As the occupation wore on, Massoud became the resistance's unifying force. Massoud's assassination in 2001 presaged the attack on the Twin Towers just two days later and it is widely believed to have been ordered by Osama bin Laden. Forever the underdog in a life dominated by conflict, Massoud's attempts to build political consensus in Afghanistan were ultimately frustrated. Despite that, he is recognised today as a national hero.

* From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author of POLITICS ON THE EDGE and co-host of THE REST IS POLITICS * Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as a MP of Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people. Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Middleland is an unforgettable portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria.

* From the No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling author of POLITICS ON THE EDGE and co-host of THE REST IS POLITICS *Rory Stewart spent nearly a decade as a MP of Britain’s most rural constituency, Penrith and the Border. As he came to know and love this part of Cumbria, he found inspiration in the beauty of its landscape, its rugged history as a frontierland, and in the spirit of its people. Drawing on pieces originally written for a local newspaper, Debatable Land is an unforgettable portrait of rural Britain today – a place caught in tensions between farming and the natural world, between the need to preserve and to grow, between local and national politics – as well as a timeless evocation of the history, people and landscape of Cumbria.

The searing inside story of our broken politics from the former Cabinet minister and co-host of The Rest Is Politics. ‘The most exceptional political memoir I’ve ever read’ ALAN JOHNSON ‘An instant classic’MARINA HYDE ‘At last a politician who can write’SEBASTIAN FAULKS Over the course of a decade, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister – before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Uncompromising, honest and darkly humorous, this is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life. Instantly praised as a new classic, it is an astonishing portrait of our turbulent times. ‘Genuinely eye-opening…always riveting, often horrifying’ iNEWS ‘Beautifully written’ GUARDIAN ‘Hugely entertaining’ EVENING STANDARD BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 * A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE FT, GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, TELEGRAPH, TIMES, OBSERVER, i NEWSPAPER, NEW STATESMAN, PROSPECT, CHURCH TIMES AND SCOTSMAN * Politics on the Edge was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller from 09.09.23–16.09.23, 09.12.23–16.12.23, 30.12.23–06.01.24 and 11.06.24—25.06.24.

Winner of the RSL Ondaatje PrizeShortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award‘A striding, glorious book . . . A flat-out masterpiece’ The New York Times Book ReviewCaught between hostile nations, warring factions and competing ideologies, Afghanistan was in turmoil following the US invasion. Travelling entirely on foot and following the inaccessible mountainous route once taken by the Mughal emperor Babur the Great, Rory Stewart was nearly defeated by the extreme, hostile conditions. Only with the help of an unexpected companion, and the generosity of the people he met on the way, did he survive to report back on his journey with unique insight on a region closed to the world by twenty-four years of war.‘This evocative book feels like a long-lost relic of the great age of exploration’ The Guardian

A fascinating insight into the complexity, history and unpredictability of Iraq from Rory Stewart, bestselling author of Politics on the Edge and host of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics.‘Devastating’ - The Sunday Times‘Absolutely absorbing’ - Ken LoachBy September 2003, six months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the anarchy had begun. Rory Stewart, then a young British diplomat, was appointed as the Coalition Provisional Authority's deputy governor of a province of 850,000 people in the southern marshland region. There, he and his colleagues confronted gangsters, Iranian-linked politicians, tribal vendettas and a full Islamist insurgency. Occupational Hazards is Rory Stewart's inside account of the attempt to rebuild a nation, the errors made, the misunderstandings and insurmountable difficulties encountered. It reveals an Iraq hidden from most foreign journalists and soldiers, a rare and compelling insight that remains just as important today.‘An extraordinarily vivid tale’ - The Guardian‘Wonderfully observed, wise, evocative’ - The Observer

The cutting down of the tree in Sycamore Gap on Hadrian’s Wall in September 2023 caused widespread shock in Britain and beyond, and for many was felt as a personal loss. Since its appearance in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves in 1991, the tree has become the iconic view of Hadrian’s Wall. In a positive response to this sad event, David Breeze, author of several books on Hadrian’s Wall, invited 80 friends and colleagues to nominate their favourite view of the Wall. The views are presented in a visual celebration with photographs and specially commissioned line drawings, each accompanied by personal reflections. The wide-ranging contributions are testimony to the affection many hold for this evocative Roman frontier.

BRITISH BOOK AWARDS NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2024 A searing insider's account of ten extraordinary years in Parliament, by the former Cabinet minister and co-presenter of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics 'The most exceptional political memoir I've ever read' ALAN JOHNSON 'An instant classic' MARINA HYDE 'At last a politician who can write' SEBASTIAN FAULKS Over the course of a decade from 2010, Rory Stewart went from being a political outsider to standing for prime minister - before being sacked from a Conservative Party that he had come to barely recognise. Tackling ministerial briefs on flood response and prison violence, engaging with conflict and poverty abroad as a foreign minister, and Brexit as a Cabinet minister, Stewart learned first-hand how profoundly hollow our democracy and government had become. Cronyism, ignorance and sheer incompetence ran rampant. Around him, individual politicians laid the foundations for the political and economic chaos of today. Stewart emerged battered but with a profound affection for his constituency of Penrith and the Border, and a deep direct insight into the era of populism and global conflict. Uncompromising, candid and darkly humorous, Politics On the Edge is his story of the challenges, absurdities and realities of political life and a remarkable portrait of our age. **A FINANCIAL TIMES, GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH, TIMES, OBSERVER, i NEWSPAPER, NEW STATESMAN, PROSPECT, CHURCH TIMES AND SCOTSMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023** Politics on the Edge was a #1 Sunday Times bestseller from 09.09.23–16.09.23, and 09.12.23–16.12.23, and 30.12.23–06.01.24

Named a Best Book of the Year by Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, and Kirkus Reviews The #1 Sunday Times bestseller, published in the UK as Politics on the Edge. "One of the best books on politics our era will see . . . A book of astonishing literary quality." --Matthew Parris, The TLS " Rory Stewart] walked across Asia, served in British Parliament, and ran against Boris Johnson. Now he gives us his view of what's wrong with politics, and how we can make it right." --Adam Grant, "The 12 New Fall Books to Enrich Your Thinking" From a great writer--legendary for his expeditions into some of the world's most forbidding places--a wise, honest, and sometimes absurdist memoir of a most remarkable journey through British politics at the breaking point Rory Stewart was an unlikely politician. He was best known for his two-year walk across Asia--in which he crossed Afghanistan, essentially solo, in the months after 9/11--and for his service, as a diplomat in Iraq, and Afghanistan. But in 2009, he abandoned his chair at Harvard University to stand for a seat in Parliament, representing the communities and farms of the Lake District and the Scottish border--one of the most isolated and beautiful districts in England. He ran as a Conservative, though he had no prior connection to the politics and there was much about the party that he disagreed with. How Not to Be a Politician is a candid and penetrating examination of life on the ground as a politician in an age of shallow populism, when every hard problem has a solution that's simple, appealing, and wrong. While undauntedly optimistic about what a public servant can accomplish in the lives of his constituents, the book is also a pitiless insider's expos of the game of politics at the highest level, often shocking in its displays of rampant cynicism, ignorance, glibness, and sheer incompetence. Stewart witnesses Britain's vote to leave the European Union and its descent into political civil war, compounded by the bad faith of his party's leaders--David Cameron, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss. Finally, after nine years of service and six ministerial roles, and shocked by his party's lurch to the populist right, Stewart ran for prime minister. Stewart's campaign took him into the lead in the opinion polls, head-to-head against Boris Johnson. How Not to Be a Politician is his effort to make sense of it all, including what has happened to politics in Britain and the world and how we can fix it. The view into democracy's dark heart is troubling, but at every turn Stewart also finds allies and ways to make a difference. A bracing, invigorating mix of irony and love infuses How Not to Be a Politician. This is one of the most revealing memoirs written by a politician in living memory.

Charles ‘Skipper’ Lynam, the celebrated preparatory school headmaster at the Dragon School, Oxford, during the First World War, inspired a generation of his pupils as they found themselves caught up in the conflict. This book tells the story of the school’s wartime years and the various fronts on which its boys were involved. It traces the roots of a school founded by Oxford dons for their children, its idiosyncratic ways and the extraordinary relationship Skipper Lynam forged with his boys, some of whom (in former pupil John Betjeman’s words) ‘lost their lives for King and Country and the Dragon School’.

'These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world,' said Charlie Wilson, of America's role backing the anti-Soviet mujahideen. 'And then we fucked up the endgame.' With no support for Afghanistan after that war, the vacuum was filled by the Taliban and bin Laden. 'The Ledger' assesses the West's similarly failed approach to Afghanistan after 9/11--in military, diplomatic, political and developmental terms. Dr David Kilcullen and Dr Greg Mills are uniquely placed to reflect backwards and forwards on the Afghan conflict: they worked with the international mission both as advisers and within the Arg, and they have considerable experience of counterinsurgency and stabilisation operations elsewhere in the world. Here these two experts show that there is plenty of blame to go around when explaining the failure to bring peace to Afghanistan after 9/11. The signs of collapse were conveniently ignored, in favour of political narratives of progress and success. Yet for Afghans, the war and its geopolitical effects are not over because NATO is gone--Afghanistan remains globally connected through digital communications and networks. This vital book explains why and where failings in Afghanistan happened, warning against exceptionalist approaches to future peacebuilding missions around the globe.

From a member of Parliament and best-selling author of The Places in Between, an exploration of the Marches--the borderland between England and Scotland--and the political turmoil and vivid lives that created it. In The Places in Between, Rory Stewart walked some of the most dangerous borderlands in the world. Now he travels with his eighty-nine-year-old father--a comical, wily, courageous, and infuriating former British intelligence officer--along the border they call home. On Stewart's four-hundred-mile walk across a magnificent natural landscape, he sleeps on mountain ridges and in housing projects, in hostels and farmhouses. With every fresh encounter--from an Afghanistan veteran based on Hadrian's Wall to a shepherd who still counts his flock in sixth-century words--Stewart uncovers more about the forgotten peoples and languages of a vanished country, now crushed between England and Scotland. Stewart and his father are drawn into unsettling reflections on landscape, their parallel careers in the bygone British Empire and Iraq, and the past, present, and uncertain future of the United Kingdom. This is a profound reflection on family, landscape, and history by a powerful and original writer.&#8220An unforgettable tale." -- National Geographic"The miracle of The Marches is not so much the treks Stewart describes, pulling in all possible relevant history, as the monument that emerges to his beloved father." -- New York Times Book Review

His father Brian taught Rory Stewart how to walk, and walked with him on journeys from Iran to Malaysia. Now they have chosen to do their final walk together along 'the Marches' - the frontier that divides their two countries, Scotland and England. This book is about their experiences and a chronicle of contemporary Britain.

“A fresh and critically important perspective on foreign interventions” (Washington Post), Can Intervention Work? distills Rory Stewart’s (author of The Places In Between) and Gerald Knaus’s remarkable firsthand experiences of political and military interventions into a potent examination of what we can and cannot achieve in a new era of nation building. As they delve into the massive, military-driven efforts in Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the authors reveal each effort’s enormous consequences for international relations, human rights, and our understanding of state building. Stewart and Knaus parse carefully the philosophies that have informed interventionism—from neoconservative to liberal imperialist—and draw on their diverse experiences in the military, nongovernmental organizations, and the Iraqi provincial government to reveal what we can ultimately expect from large-scale interventions and how they might best realize positive change in the world. Author and columnist Fred Kaplan calls Can Intervention Work? “the most thorough examination of the subject [of intervention] that I’ve read in a while.”

In 1933, the delightfully eccentric travel writer Robert Byron set out on a journey through the Middle East via Beirut, Jerusalem, Baghdad and Teheran to Oxiana, near the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. Throughout, he kept a thoroughly captivating record of his encounters, discoveries, and frequent misadventures. His story would become a best-selling travel book throughout the English-speaking world, until the acclaim died down and it was gradually forgotten. When Paul Fussell published his own book Abroad, in 1982, he wrote that The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book what "Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry." His statements revived the public's interest in the book, and for the first time, it was widely available in American bookstores. Now this long-overdue reprint will introduce it to a whole new generation of readers. This edition features a new introduction by Rory Stewart, best known for his book The Places In Between, about his extensive travels in Afghanistan. Today, in addition to its entertainment value, The Road to Oxiana also serves as a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now inaccessible to most Western travelers, and a nostalgic look back at a more innocent time.

A fascinating insight into the complexity, history and unpredictability of Iraq from Rory Stewart, bestselling author of Politics on the Edge and host of hit podcast The Rest Is Politics. By September 2003, six months after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the anarchy had begun. Rory Stewart, a young British diplomat, was appointed as the Coalition Provisional Authority's deputy governor of a province of 850,000 people in the southern marshland region. There, he and his colleagues confronted gangsters, Iranian-linked politicians, tribal vendettas and a full Islamist insurgency. Occupational Hazards is Rory Stewart's inside account of the attempt to rebuild a nation, the errors made, the misunderstandings and insurmountable difficulties encountered. It reveals an Iraq hidden from most foreign journalists and soldiers. Stewart is an award-winning writer, gifted with extraordinary insight into the comedy, occasional heroism and moral risks of foreign occupation.'Beautifully written, highly evocative . . . a joy to read' – John Simpson'A marvellous book . . . a devastating narrative' – Simon Jenkins'Absolutely absorbing' – Ken Loach'Strikes gut and brain at once' – James Meek'Wonderfully observed, wise, evocative' – Observer

Recounts how the author, a British diplomat, was named deputy governor of Amarah and Nasiriya in southern Iraq at the end of 2003, an appointment during which he negotiated hostage releases, held elections, and worked to organize a social infrastructure for millions of beleaguered Iraqi citizens. Reprint.

A New York Times BestsellerThis acccount of a 36-day walk across Afghanistan, starting just weeks after the fall of the Taliban, is "stupendous...an instant travel classic" (Entertainment Weekly). In January 2002, Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan, surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion -- a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following. Through these encounters -- by turns touching, confounding, surprising, and funny -- Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.