We asked writers and thinkers associated with Blue Labour for their reading suggestions for lockdown. The choices both reflect the strange circumstances we now find ourselves in and provide the intellectual and cultural backdrop to the wider politics of Blue Labour. The first selection in this series is by Jonathan Rutherford.

You can read the second selection, by Tobias Phibbs, here. The third selection, by Jack Hutchison, here. The fourth selection, by Liam Stokes, here. The fifth selection, by Paul Embery, here. And the final selection, by Maurice Glasman, here.

I’ll start with the thrillers of Robert Crais which I’ve been reading. They feature two great characters, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. It’s best to start with the first in the series, The Monkey’s Raincoat, although LA Requiem might be the definitive story. Pike beats Jack Reacher as a modern heroic figure, less perfect, more rough edged, a crusader of the good. There is a lot of cultural snobbery about the thriller, but if you want insights into society, power, masculinity, the pursuit of justice, you’ll find nowhere better to look. There is a cultural excavation to be done of this genre read by millions, to explore its influence in shaping popular morality and culture. No doubt it has played its role in the current class cultural wars.

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate has been called the Soviet War and Peace and it’s not hyperbole. Its wide cast of characters and depiction of ordinary life and people in the wartime Soviet Union make it an epic, but it carries philosophical, moral and political insights into Stalinism that lift it into being a great and unique novel. Grossman submitted it for publication in 1960. The KGB confiscated it, raided his flat and took away carbon copies, typewriter ribbons and notebooks. Grossman died four years later, but fortunately he had given copies to two friends for safekeeping. In 1974 the manuscript was put onto microfilm and smuggled out of the country. It was eventually published in the West in 1980. Recounting this, I have to also mention Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope , a memoir of her life with her poet husband Osip, and another extraordinary, finely written depiction of the banal terror, cruelty and mediocrity of Stalinism.

Grossman produced his masterpieces out of the nihilism of Stalinism. Germany produced similarly extraordinary work in reaction to Nazism. When Martin Heidegger embraced Nazism and anti-semitism in 1933 he precipitated a crisis in four young German Jewish intellectuals who had been his students. Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse were each to become significant intellectuals in their own right. And part of what made them significant was their confrontation with Heidegger’s existentialism; the sense that it could tip either into human freedom and a kind of humanist religiosity or into the volk fantasies of Nazism, enslavement and mass murder.

Hannah Arendt is the best known and most brilliant of the four, but my favourite book of this group is Karl Lowith’s Meaning of History, a wonderfully written series of interconnecting essays debunking the idea of history as a ‘last religion’ and thus a source of millenarian thinking. Thinkers like Comte, Proudhon, and Marx rejected divine providence and replaced it with a belief in progress and an ‘attempt to establish predictable laws of secular history.’ Lowith understood the consequences. ‘There are in history’ he writes, ‘not only ‘flowers of evil’ but also evils which are the fruit of too much good will’.

In the final months of the Second World War and in the aftermath of defeat, Germany produced what became known as Rubble Literature. A small group of writers, which began with Wolfgang Borchert, bore witness to Germany’s epic destruction. The best known is Heinrich Boll but my favourite book is Berlin Finale by Heinz Rein, probably the most conventional in terms of narrative. More recently on the same themes of Germany’s guilt and its relationship to redemption, Walter Kempowski’s All For Nothing establishes his reputation as a foremost writer. The ending alone sets him apart.

Russia and Germany between them have produced Europe’s greatest art and culture and its most monstrous nightmares. Both were overwhelmed by millenarian political movements of the industrial era which unleashed unimaginable savagery. England has followed a more moderate historical course and no-one has told this story better than Robert Tombs in The English and their History. I picked it up in the policy room in the office of the leader of the opposition where it had been left untouched for weeks. The hardback version was very large and the cover a hideous orange, but it proved to be a defining political influence. And if you like history and believe that the past can help us make better sense of the present, read Geoffrey Elton’s great Reform and Reformation which tells the story of Thomas Cromwell’s making of the modern English and UK unitary state. Between the two books you will get a better sense of why England voted to leave the EU in 2016, why we didn’t change our minds, and the changes we need now.