'Affable, invisible... the man with a brilliant future behind him.' Thus Varsity magazine appraised Kenneth Clarke's term as President of the Cambridge Union in the summer of 1963. Dominated by his opposition to the admission of women students to the Union, Clarke's Presidency had been less than distinguished. But Varsity, like so many commentators throughout Clarke's political career, seriously underestimated a politician who, three decades later, has emerged as a strong man within a weak Conservative administration, often tipped as a possible successor to John Major should the bailiffs be summoned to Number Ten. Clarke, as Andy McSmith explains in this fast-paced and highly readable biography, is above all a survivor who has been a government minister since 1979. Despite his reputation as the 'thinking man's lager lout', Clarke is an old-fashioned 1960s One-Nation Tory who played the tough guy with considerable adroitness in order to survive under Thatcher's hard-line administration. Displaying the same joviality which has seen him sign up for both the Campaign for Social Democracy and the Conservative Club on arrival at Cambridge, Clarke frankly admitted in the 1970s that it was only the arithmetic of Britain's first-past-the-post election system which kept him in the same party as the British nationalists of the Tory right. His pragmatism served him well as he progressed from being the youngest high-flier in the Heath government to the Minister responsible for introducing the highly controversial 'internal market' in the NHS under Thatcher, and now to the happy position of Chancellor of the Exchequer with an economy recovering from recession. Clarke's presence at the heart of the Tory government demonstrates that the mix of free-market liberalism and British nationalism to which Mrs Thatcher gave her name never really took root in the Conservative government. Right-wing Tory rebels who plead that the EC is destroying Britain as a nation-state, or free-market ideologues who want to privitize whatever remains of the welfare state, find Kenneth Clarke an obstacle to their ambitions. From Clarke's point of view, social instability and trade barriers are bad for business. The rise and rise of this most flexible of politicians, according to Andy McSmith's engaging account, may not be enough to stop the cracks in a Tory Party now beyond repair.

If you don’t know the Tobacco Wars, you don’t know American history.

Imagine a lawless militia of 10,000 masked men roaming the cities and countrysides of the United States. Brandishing firearms, these “Night Riders” set fire to warehouses and barns, destroy millions of dollars of product, and tear businessmen from their homes to torture them—their revenge against an apathetic One Percent who profit off the misery of the working class. This is not a scene from an apocalyptic movie. It’s a fact of American history.

The most violent and prolonged conflict between the Civil War and the Civil Rights struggles, the Tobacco Wars changed the course of American history—and America’s economy. So why haven’t you ever heard of it? In Tobacco, Trusts And Trump: How America’s Forgotten War Created Big Government, entrepreneur Jim Rumford draws from one of the largest private collections of Tobacco Wars primary documents, as well as his own family ties to the conflict, to show how the United States today is spiraling toward the same chaos that sparked the bloody war between the working class of America’s heartland and the Great Tobacco Trust—and why the Establishment doesn’t want you to know about it. Citing nearly three hundred sources, Rumford weaves a compelling narrative to show how the subjects of recent headlines—the TEA Party, Silicon Valley oligopolies, Occupy Wall Street protests, the Socialist rhetoric of Senator Bernie Sanders, outsourcing of blue collar careers, and the election of President Donald J. Trump—echo those of a century ago.

From Big Business monopolies that triggered financial recessions to the Populist and Progressive movements that enabled Big Government to strip Americans of numerous freedoms, the consequences of the Tobacco Wars could not be more relevant today.