Michael Gove: A Man in a Hurry
OWEN BENNETT
(BITEBACK, 432 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

“Political biographers who choose to write about a figure not yet at the end of their career are taking a gamble.” Not my words (or grammar), but those of the author describing Michael Gove’s own venture into political biography back in 1995, when he published a book about the then defence secretary, Michael Portillo. This was an ambitious and – as it turned out – badly-timed project, not least because it was precociously subtitled “The Future of the Right” when “A Future on the Railways” might have been more appropriate.