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Books about Labour dominate the list of what MPs are reading this summer with Peter Mandelson's memoir The Third Man (HarperCollins) the most popular choice.
In Waterstone's third annual ComRes survey of MPs' holiday reading, five per cent chose the New Labour architect's autobiography. Labour MP Chris Mullin's A View from The Foothills (Profile), set to be a BBC Radio 4 "Book of the Week" from 30th August, was joint second along with Christopher Andrew's The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 (Penguin).
The four books tied for third place were Alastair Campbell's Diaries Volume One: Prelude to Power (Hutchinson), The Pinch by Conservative MP David Willetts (Atlantic), The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen (Penguin).
Andrew Lake, Waterstone's politics buyer, said: "Mandelson was a key figure in New Labour, one of the most controversial political figures of his generation. His book was published with perfect timing for maximum controversy and the contents really delivered. This is a must-read book for anyone who lived through the New Labour years, or for new MPs wanting to learn the dark arts of spin."
Fiction was the most popular subject area with 48% of MPs choosing a novel for summer reading compared to 28% choosing a political book. No one novel was more popular than another and the titles chosen included Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns (Bloomsbury), Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire (Quercus), William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms (Bloomsbury), Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate) and Ian McEwan's Solar (Jonathan Cape).
The most popular authors were Robert Harris and Stieg Larsson, both of whom had three titles chosen.
Biographies on the likes of De Gaulle, William Wilberforce, Paddy Ashdown, Shirley Williams, Edward Heath, Lyndon Johnson, Cardinal Newman, John and Robert Kennedy, Thomas More and Agatha Christie were also selected.
Lake said: "Overall, this list shows that while New Labour have lost power, there is still great fascination about the era amongst politicians new and old."