Christopher Booker – författare

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling.But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose.Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years.This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

In Groupthink, his final book, the late, eminent journalist and bestselling author Christopher Booker seeks to identify the hidden key to understanding much that is disturbing about the world today.With reference to the ideas of a Yale professor who first identified the theory, and to the writings of George Orwell from whose ‘newspeak’ the word was adapted, Booker sheds new light on the remarkable – and worrying – effects of ‘groupthink’, and its influence on our society.Booker defines the three rules of groupthink: the adoption of a common view or belief not based on objective reality; the establishment of a consensus of right-minded people, an ‘in group’; and the need to treat the views of anyone who questions the belief as wholly unacceptable. He shows how various interest groups, journalists and even governments in the twenty-first century have subscribed to this way of thinking, with deeply disturbing results.As Booker shows, such behaviour has led to a culture of fear, heralded by countless examples throughout history, from Revolutionary Russia to Napoleonic France and Hitler’s Germany. In the present moment it has caused countless errors in judgement and the division of society into highly polarised, oppositional factions. As Booker argues, only by examining its underlying causes can we understand the sinister power of groupthink which permeates all aspects of our lives.

Booker focuses his attention on the mother of all environmental scares: global warming.This original book considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history.Christopher Booker interweaves the science of global warming with that of its growing political consequences, showing how just when the politicians are threatening to change our Western way of life beyond recognition, the scientific evidence behind the global warming theory is being challenged like never before.The book exposes the myth that the global warming theory is supported by a 'consensus of the world's top climate scientists'. It shows how the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is run by a small group of 'global warming' zealots, who have repeatedly rigged evidence to support their theory. But the politicians, pushed by the media, have so fallen for its propaganda that, short of dramatic change, our Western world now faces an unprecedented disaster.

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of ''basic stories'' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling. But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are ''programmed'' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have ''lost the plot'' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose.Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind''s psychological development over the past 5000 years.This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

In Groupthink, his final book, the late, eminent journalist and bestselling author Christopher Booker seeks to identify the hidden key to understanding much that is disturbing about the world today. With reference to the ideas of a Yale professor who first identified the theory, and to the writings of George Orwell from whose ''newspeak'' the word was adapted, Booker sheds new light on the remarkable – and worrying – effects of ''groupthink'', and its influence on our society. Booker defines the three rules of groupthink: the adoption of a common view or belief not based on objective reality; the establishment of a consensus of right-minded people, an ''in group''; and the need to treat the views of anyone who questions the belief as wholly unacceptable. He shows how various interest groups, journalists and even governments in the twenty-first century have subscribed to this way of thinking, with deeply disturbing results. As Booker shows, such behaviour has led to a culture of fear, heralded by countless examples throughout history, from Revolutionary Russia to Napoleonic France and Hitler''s Germany. In the present moment it has caused countless errors in judgement and the division of society into highly polarised, oppositional factions. As Booker argues, only by examining its underlying causes can we understand the sinister power of groupthink which permeates all aspects of our lives.

In Groupthink, his final book, the late, eminent journalist and bestselling author Christopher Booker seeks to identify the hidden key to understanding much that is disturbing about the world today. With reference to the ideas of a Yale professor who first identified the theory, and to the writings of George Orwell from whose 'newspeak' the word was adapted, Booker sheds new light on the remarkable – and worrying – effects of 'groupthink', and its influence on our society. Booker defines the three rules of groupthink: the adoption of a common view or belief not based on objective reality; the establishment of a consensus of right-minded people, an 'in group'; and the need to treat the views of anyone who questions the belief as wholly unacceptable. He shows how various interest groups, journalists and even governments in the twenty-first century have subscribed to this way of thinking, with deeply disturbing results. As Booker shows, such behaviour has led to a culture of fear, heralded by countless examples throughout history, from Revolutionary Russia to Napoleonic France and Hitler's Germany. In the present moment it has caused countless errors in judgement and the division of society into highly polarised, oppositional factions. As Booker argues, only by examining its underlying causes can we understand the sinister power of groupthink which permeates all aspects of our lives.

Newly revised and updated in the light of COVID-19.For most of the latter part of the last century, and the early part of this, Britain has been assailed by a succession of ''scares'', from salmonella and eggs to BSE, from the Millennium Bug to bird flu, from DDT to passive smoking, from asbestos to global warming. These scares have become one of the most conspicuous and damaging features of our modern world, so much so that as we entered the third decade of the new century, our senses had become so blunted that we scarcely recognised the real thing for what it was, until it arrived – COVID-19, for which we were almost completely unprepared.The authors analyse the crucial roles of the different factions who perpetrated the scares: from the scientists who misread or manipulated the evidence to the media and lobbyists who eagerly promoted scares without regard to the consequences, and the politicians and officials who came up with absurdly disproportionate responses, leaving us to pay a colossal price.In this updated edition, Scared to Death not only presents a detailed account of the scares that have dominated our society for the past 50 years – through all of which the authors lived – but also examines the background to the COVID-19 pandemic, tracing our lack of preparedness to its roots and then assessing, by way of contrast, why this is the real thing, as opposed to the succession of scares that we have experienced.

Now published with a new preface explaining why The Great Deception is of the utmost importance today as it was when it was first published and to coincide with Great Britain''s EU referendum in 2016, this book suggests that the United States of Europe and its edict of ''ever closer union'' have been based on a colossal confidence trick.This book tells for the first time the inside story of the most audacious political project of modern times: the plan to unite Europe under a single ''supranational'' government. From the 1920s, when the blueprint for the European Union was first conceived by a British civil servant, this meticulously documented account takes the story right up to the moves to give Europe a political constitution, already planned 60 years ago to be the ''crowning dream'' of the whole project. The book shows how the gradual assembling of a European government has amounted to a ''slow motion coup d''etat'', based on a strategy of deliberate deception, into which Britain''s leaders, Macmillan and Heath, were consciously drawn. Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, scarcely an episode of the story does not emerge in startling new light, from the real reasons why de Gaulle kept Britain out in the 1960s to the fall of Mrs Thatcher. The book chillingly shows how Britain''s politicians, not least Tony Blair, were consistently outplayed in a game the rules of which they never understood. But it ends by asking whether, from the euro to enlargement, the ''project'' has now overreached itself, as a gamble doomed to fail. Since their collaboration began in 1992, Christopher Booker, a Sunday Telegraph columnist, and Richard North, who worked for four years in Brussels and Strasbourg as a senior researcher, have won a unique reputation for their expertise on Britain''s relationship to the European Union. Their previous publications included The Mad Officials (1994) and The Castle of Lies (1996). But they regard The Great Deception as the book they had been waiting to write for ten years.

Now published with a new preface explaining why The Great Deception is of the utmost importance today as it was when it was first published and to coincide with Great Britain''s EU referendum in 2016, this book suggests that the United States of Europe and its edict of ''ever closer union'' have been based on a colossal confidence trick.This book tells for the first time the inside story of the most audacious political project of modern times: the plan to unite Europe under a single ''supranational'' government. From the 1920s, when the blueprint for the European Union was first conceived by a British civil servant, this meticulously documented account takes the story right up to the moves to give Europe a political constitution, already planned 60 years ago to be the ''crowning dream'' of the whole project. The book shows how the gradual assembling of a European government has amounted to a ''slow motion coup d''etat'', based on a strategy of deliberate deception, into which Britain''s leaders, Macmillan and Heath, were consciously drawn. Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, scarcely an episode of the story does not emerge in startling new light, from the real reasons why de Gaulle kept Britain out in the 1960s to the fall of Mrs Thatcher. The book chillingly shows how Britain''s politicians, not least Tony Blair, were consistently outplayed in a game the rules of which they never understood. But it ends by asking whether, from the euro to enlargement, the ''project'' has now overreached itself, as a gamble doomed to fail. Since their collaboration began in 1992, Christopher Booker, a Sunday Telegraph columnist, and Richard North, who worked for four years in Brussels and Strasbourg as a senior researcher, have won a unique reputation for their expertise on Britain''s relationship to the European Union. Their previous publications included The Mad Officials (1994) and The Castle of Lies (1996). But they regard The Great Deception as the book they had been waiting to write for ten years.