Political Advice

Jacqueline Rose is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy (2011), which won the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society. Her recent research has been in the field of counsel and advice, and she was the editor of The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland 1286-1707, published by the British Academy in 2016. Colin Kidd is Wardlaw Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is the author of five books including Subverting Scotland’s Past (1993), Union and Unionisms (2008), and The World of Mr Casaubon (2016). He is a frequent contributor to the London Review of Books and the Guardian.

This richly compelling volume traces the mostly hidden history of political advice from Greek democracy to present-day spadocracy. I would advise any modern Machiavelli or rising Rasputin, as well as every politician and political historian, to heed its timely counsel.

• 1 Introduction Jacqueline Rose and Colin Kidd2 What would Pericles Do?—And Why It Still MattersEsther Eidinow3 Obliquus ductus: Indirect Political Advice in the RenaissanceJoanne Paul4 How Not to Do It: Poets and Counsel, Thomas Wyatt to Geoffrey HillColin Burrow 5 William Davison and the perils of advice in Elizabethan EnglandJacqueline Rose6 Parliament counsels the Crown: advice, rhetoric and party politics since the seventeenth centuryPaul Seaward7 Adam Smith and Political Advice: Three Smithian MomentsJesse Norman 8 The Central Policy Review Staff: a useful model?William Waldegrave9 Astrology and Advice at the Reagan CourtColin Kidd 10 Expertise and advice in two referendum campaignsJim Gallagher11 Revisiting the Eagle and the Lion: Politics, policy and the JCPOAAli Ansari12 ‘You’ve got to ask the right expert’: Political ideologies of advice-givingMarius Ostrowski13 Effective Political Advice in an Age of PopulismMartin Donnelly 14 The Future of Political Advice: The Problem of Cybersecurity: Lucas Kello 15 AfterwordRobin Butler