Honourable Misfits

Politicians are weird - we can all agree on that. But do you know how much weirder they used to be? If not, Honourable Misfits is the book for you. Spanning from the past seven hundred years, this is a celebration of the oddest and most eccentric MPs the House of Commons has ever seen. From mad inventors and fearless adventurers to machiavellian villains and mavericks with more money than sense, it offers sixty-five pen portraits of the unique, the mysterious and the downright deranged.There is the one who built a complex network of tunnels and underground rooms underneath his estate; the one who liked to go hunting naked; the one who set himself on fire to cure his hiccups, and the one who invented a very small gun with which to kill flies.Still, they weren't all useless; there was also the MP who invented weather forecasts, and the one who documented more animal species than nearly everyone else. They weren't all good either; between the fascist turned Buddhist monk and the spy who faked his death, there are more than enough villains to go around. They also weren't all lucky; included in Honourable Misfits are tributes to MPs with tragic deaths, from falling on a turnip to getting in a car accident the day after getting elected. This is a book to celebrate human nature in all its odd, compelling complexity.

At a time when British politics is so depressing, it's a joy to read about the follies of MPs in the past written with such gusto and elan. Every politician should have a copy of this by their bed and by the side of any other bed they may use, What a brilliant collection of characters - the wacky, the weird and (occasionally) the wise. Marie makes history more fun than it's meant to be. Dip in, and you won't be able to dip out, This is something you didn't know you needed: a book to make you strangely fond of MPs. At least, some MPs - and all of them dead. At heart it is a very entertaining, affectionate celebration of weirdness, and a memorial to many people who have almost completely been forgotten (some of them rightly). And it will almost certainly make you feel better about how YOUR career's going

Marie Le Conte is a French-Moroccan journalist and writer based in London. Raised in France, she moved to Britain in 2009 to study journalism and has worked at a range of publications, including the Evening Standard and BuzzFeed News. Since going freelance in 2017, she has written for everyone from GQ and the Guardian to VICE and the New Statesman, and frequently appears on radio and television. Her first book, Haven't You Heard? Gossip, Politics and Power is out now.