Chris Bryant

A Life and a Half (eBook, ePUB)

The Unexpected Making of a Politician

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARDS 2025

The gripping, remarkably candid story of one man's unorthodox life before politics, from Labour minister and Sunday Times-bestselling author Chris Bryant

'Charming, unexpected, honest' RORY STEWART
'One of the handful of sitting MPs who can genuinely write . . . A terrific book, funny, frank and moving in equal measure' FINANCIAL TIMES

Before he was a politician, Chris Bryant was an Anglican priest, baptising babies and holding the hands of the dying. Before that, he manned the barricades in Latin America, and before that, he was the scared son of an alcoholic mother and an estranged father.

This is a no-holds-barred account of a minister's truly unconventional life before politics - one that has left Bryant equally at home behind the altar, in sweaty gay clubs, on the hustings or the stage. With characteristic frankness, he recounts growing up in General Franco's Spain, acting alongside some of the most talented names of the day as a teenager, and caring for his brother and mother as she descended into addiction. He ran the family home from sixteen, became ordained at twenty-four and came out as gay shortly after. And that's just the early years.

A Life and a Half tells a gripping story of bishops and actors, drag queens and pushy candidates, stuffed with moments of joy and hilarity and sorrow and abuse. All while tracking the landscape of late-twentieth-century British politics, from Thatcher to the birth of New Labour. It is a memoir like no other.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury eBooks UK
• Seitenzahl: 336
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. August 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781526680952
• Artikelnr.: 75255273

Autorenporträt

Chris Bryant is an acclaimed historian of Parliament and a Sunday Times bestselling author. He has been the MP for the Rhondda (now Rhondda and Ogmore) since 2001. Between 2020 and 2023, he chaired the Committees on Standards and Privileges, which have guardianship of the Code of Conduct and adjudicate on individual cases. Bryant was the first gay MP to celebrate his civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster. Code of Conduct was an instant top two Sunday Times bestseller and The Glamour Boys won the 2020 Parliamentary Book Award for Best Non-Fiction. He currently serves as Minister of State for Trade Policy.

Rezensionen

This absorbing memoir is the kind of book those who bemoan career politicians will love – it stops when Chris Bryant becomes the MP for Rhondda in 2001. Instead, it focuses on his formative years growing up with an alcoholic mother and absent father, suffering sexual abuse, and being ordained into the priesthood. A Life and a Half is perceptive, revealing and full of suppressed trauma, but it can also take on the quality of a mischievous confessional, particularly when recounting wild times in Latin American Christian ministries. Unorthodox but beguilingly human