Glenn Baker recommends
Glenn joined Charles Stanley in 2018 and is responsible for its relationships with professional advisers, such as solicitors and accountants, as well as with trustees, charities and foundations. He was previously a Director at Kleinwort Benson, before which he worked at Schroders.
Glenn holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Leicester and is a Board Member on the Action for Animal Health Development Board for the international charity The Brooke, looking at the development of One Health - human, animal and environmental.
Glenn sits on Charles Stanley’s Responsible Investment Committee and is the Branch Administrator for STEP City of London.
Read on to find out which six books Glenn recommends, and why…
“My reading is highly eclectic, which is a hangover from my days as a PhD student – my doctorate was in English Literature, specifically the Renaissance, which in turn of course was the largest eclectic cultural exercise in the formation of modern Europe. I have since struggled to be confined to one discipline (especially in an age of increased specialisation!), let alone confined to one reading genre, and so you may find a certain juxtaposition among my choice of six. That said, I find one constant when reading - stepping into the world and perspective of others is extremely healthy for one’s emotional intelligence – as well as fun!
Reading also serves another purpose for me – as a writer of novels myself, reading is the single, most effective tool to enable self-development – the second is jolting myself into action to actually write – whenever time allows!”
Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell
This is one of the best novels that I have read in the last couple of years – a fictional account of a Latin tutor turned playwright of Stratford (never named) and his wife Agnes (Anne) Hathaway who, in this book, is an illiterate yet gifted and intuitive healer, who strives to save the couple’s son, Hamnet, from the plague.
Very well written and brimming with imagery, it was the winner of the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Norse America
Gordon Campbell
Still think that Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ North America? Columbus never even went to North America. Think that the Vikings ‘founded’ the USA? They didn’t. Both are developed from false claims and fake archaeological evidence, which serve the uncomfortable purpose of supremacist discourses centred on what it is to be American. These run deeply into the culture, society and economics of the US today.
This book considers the arguments and the evidence for a Norse America, and the book featured in the FT’s Top 10 Non-Fiction works for 2021 - and the author, Gordon Campbell, was my doctorial supervisor.
The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood
Atwood may be best known for The Handmaid’s Tale and possibly for her later dystopian fantasy novels, but I am personally more of a fan of her ‘middle period’, in which books such as The Robber Bride, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin were written.
I find Atwood so much more insightful in this period in terms of character development, and The Blind Assassin is simply brilliant. Difficult to sum-up in a sentence - it is essentially about a wealthy young woman who has a dodgy affair in the turbulent 1930s with a socialist man on the run. I haven’t done it justice: the way it is written, and the architecture of the novel, is simply breath-taking – oh, and it won the Booker Prize in 2000 and the Hammett Prize in 2001.
Women in Dark Times
Jacqueline Rose
The excellent Jacqueline Rose is a philosopher and academic (currently Professor of Humanities at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities) and in this book she shows how three visionary women offer a new template for thought: revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg; German–Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon, persecuted by family tragedy and Nazism; film icon and consummate performer Marilyn Monroe.
Taking their stand and enraged by the injustices of their times, they each move between public and private pain, each has a willingness to bring the unspeakable to light, with Rose making the case that all three are original thinkers in their own ways. These women have a shared story, across some of the most dramatic events of the twentieth century – revolution, totalitarianism, and the American dream – and Rose asks why this should all come at great personal cost: Luxemburg and Salomon were murdered, and it is obviously contentious if this was so for Monroe – but the deeply embedded impulse to think that Monroe may have been murdered is part of Rose’s overall argument, I think.
1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
James Shapiro
Keyhole biography was a growing trend in the noughties and the concept is powerfully attractive: a subject is depicted and then extrapolated within a given, eventful year. This book is probably the best of the practice that I have read and it asks an exciting question in this pivotal year for Shakespeare: how did he go from being a talented poet and playwright to become one of the greatest writers who ever lived?
Shapiro traces Shakespeare throughout 1599 in terms of what he reads and writes, what he saw and who he worked with as he invests in the new Globe theatre and creates four of his most famous plays - Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, As You Like It.
Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specialises in Shakespeare – a safe pair of hands moving through what can be a minefield of scholarship.
The King's Painter: The Life and Times of Hans Holbein
Franny Moyle
Hans Holbein is considered one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century, and I found this 2021 biography fascinating in showcasing Holbein’s opportunism: Holbein travelled to England in 1526 in search of work with a recommendation from Erasmus (whom he had previously painted), and was welcomed into the humanist circle of Thomas More and, eventually, working under the patronage of Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell, Holbein was appointed King’s Painter to Henry VIII of England.
Franny Moyle’s book is beautifully illustrated (and consistently so, which is gratifying to find), and I loved how she really gets to grips with just how versatile Holbein is, as he moves across multiple styles and traditions, with Holbein possibly single-handedly influencing how we now ‘see’ Tudor England.