Barzun

It is run by former BBC and The Times executive James Harding, and former US ambassador to the UK Matthew Barzun.

Mr Harding launched Tortoise with the former US ambassador to the UK James Barzun.

“The show gets the informality of really good meetings in the foreign secretary’s office, minus the people dropping dead,” said Matthew Barzun, who served as ambassador during the Obama administration.

The key to keeping one’s sanity, Mr. Barzun said, is not to worry about being in every critical meeting.

The magazine’s alternative list includes Jacques Barzun’s “God’s Country and Mine,” described as “the definitive rejoinder to fashionable anti-Americanism,” and Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop,” summed up as a “prophetically satiric novel about wars of liberation.”