[Note: At the moment three pieces are being held at the top of this column – this one, a piece about Professor Alex Edmans, and a piece about Professor Janice Fiamengo. To see more recent pieces in chronological order, please scroll beyond these three pieces or check out the latest pieces on the right. We apologise for any inconvenience.]

Happy Easter to all the wonderful followers of this blog.

It’s time to revive the venerable old tradition of ordering ten books at Easter. Our list of recommended books is here. Feel free to suggest any additions. I recently embarked on a mission to read all of Philip Roth‘s books before I shuffle off my perch. He and George Orwell are my favourite fiction writers.

The Amazon author page showing the ten international bestsellers I’ve written – in hardback, paperback and ebook editions – is here. Almost all are still in print (or available as ebooks) from Amazon and other online retailers (the ebooks are available to buy for all devices). For some reason the page doesn’t include Buchanan’s Dictionary of Quotations for right-minded people (2010). That book’s cover features my favourite photograph of former prime minister Gordon Brown, wearing bomb disposal equipment. It was taken in Kabul, Afghanistan. The full cover, with 12 quotations on the back:

The book is currently out of print. On the rare occasions used copies in good condition surface on Amazon and elsewhere, they have sold for as much as £200.

My first book was commercially published by the international business book publisher Kogan Page in 2008, Profitable Buying Strategies, Amazon is still selling new copies for £39.99, an absolute steal, I think we can all agree. The book was published after I’d finished a consulting assignment at the Conservative Party headquarters in London over 2006-8, during which time I created and implemented a new commercial model for conferences. The events, the largest conferences in Europe at the time with 12,000+ delegates, had been outsourced and were loss-making for the party for a number of years.

The new conference model was managed by a newly-formed company established to only run the Tory party conferences, and delivered £11.5+ MILLION POUNDS to Conservative party coffers over 2007-14. It was, I was reliably informed, their #1 source of income over that period.

I wrote a blog piece about the matter in 2021, Mike Buchanan’s £11,500,000+ donation to the Conservative party. The future Baron Buchanan of Bedford, surely? Not long afterwards I was contacted by a feminist, threatening to report me to the parliamentary authorities for openly soliciting a peerage.

The progressive former Tory prime minister David Cameron – he loathed the older members of the party, and they loathed him – wrote the following in his autobiography For The Record (hardback edition, p.96), about the years following 2005, when he was elected as his party’s leader:

“We sold our historic headquarters in Smith Square, and even the loss-making annual party conference started to make money; by the time I left office [J4MB: 2016] it was making close to £2 million a year. The party was debt-free, and there was around £2 million cash in the bank.”

I terminated my Conservative party membership in 2009 when Cameron announced he was going to introduce all-women shortlists for prospective parliamentary candidates. I emailed the Head of Membership and explained why I was terminating my membership. He called me to tell me that many other party members had done the same.

Cameron’s planned initiative encouraged me to learn about feminism and feminists, and in due course to raise public awareness about them, something that I’ve devoted the past 16 years to, and to which I plan to devote the remainder of my days.

Cameron’s chief strategist Steve Hilton (they became friends whilst both studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics – PPE – at Oxford university) was one of the strangest human beings it’s ever been my misfortune to meet (colleagues I spoke to about him mostly felt likewise). In 2015 we published a post, Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s former chief strategist, fawns over Harriet Harman, with a link to a video (2:38) of Hilton and Harman being interviewed by Andrew Marr.

Kogan Page recently offered to give me the rights to publish Profitable Buying Strategies privately, which I intend to do shortly through my modest publishing concern, LPS publishing. The titles we’ve published (mostly non-fiction) are here. To my mind the content of Profitable Buying Strategies is as relevant today as when it was published in 2008, maybe more so as the procurement profession has been increasingly feminised, with (I’m reliably informed) predictably negative consequences, as with other professions (teaching, police, fire service, medicine, politics, the military…).

Feel free to contact me (mike@j4mb.org.uk) if you’d like me to consider publishing your book, regardless of its subject matter, on a commercial basis (for less than “vanity publishers” will charge). I consider many of theos companies (and individuals) to be rip-off merchants – of course they never term themselves vanity publishers – cynically exploiting the naivety and ignorance of prospective self-publishers, particularly in relation to exaggerating likely book sale numbers. LPS publishing will obviously not publish anything that’s pro-feminist and/or anti-male.

If you’re considering self-publishing, you might find my book The Joy of Self-Publishing (2010) useful. It will tell you all you need to know. A few things have moved on in the self-publishing world since I wrote the book – most notably, Amazon entering the Print on Demand market – but I’d be happy to take you through them in an email exchange or Zoom video call, after you’ve bought the book.

Authors who started off self-publishing include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Horace Walpole, Honoré de Balzac, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, John Galsworthy, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter, Lord Byron, Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, WH Davies, Zane Grey, Ezra Pound, DH Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Alexander Pope, Robbie Burns, James Joyce, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Stern, and William Blake, the engraver. Blake even mixed his own inks. I’m not going to suggest you go that far.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) wrote a line in his notes to Queen Mab that appears prominently on the rear cover of my book The Marriage Delusion: the fraud of the rings? (2009):

“A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage.”

Another Shelley – Shelley Winters – once remarked:

“In Hollywood, all the marriages are happy. It’s trying to live together afterwards that causes all the problems.”

Winters married four times, the last time hours before her death at the age of 85 to her long-time companion Gerry DeFord, with whom she had lived for 19 years.

I had the idea of including a quotations section about love, sex and marriage in The Marriage Delusion, the section turned out to be 16 pages long. I included quotations sections in most of my later books. The section ends with this from Henny Youngman, whose Wikipedia page starts with this:

“Henry “Henny” Youngman (March 16, 1906 – February 24, 1998) was an English-born American comedian and musician famous for his mastery of the “one-liner“, his best known being “Take my wife… please”.” His quotation in The Marriage Delusion:

“Do you know what it means to come home at night to a woman who’ll give you a little love, a little affection, a little tenderness? It means you’re in the wrong house, that’s what it means.”

It’s been ten years since I published my last book, FEMINISM: The Ugly Truth (2015). The front cover features a photograph of a waxwork female vampire in Eastern Europe. For some unknown reason the image annoys feminists, so I haven’t changed it. To me, a female vampire personifies perfectly the toxic femininity and ugliness and evil that are displayed relentlessly by feminists.

The book is 408 pages long, 28 of them in the quotations section. Chapter titles include, Are some feminists e.g. Tracey Emin, a pain in the arts?

Erin Pizzey – who, the following year was the keynote speaker at ICMI16 in London, the video of her speech “Intergenerational Family Violence v. The Big Lie” (38:05) is here – kindly wrote the Foreword to FEMINISM: the ugly truth, she ended with this:

“Mike Buchanan is a very brave man. I’ve known other men who’ve tried to draw the public’s attention to the damage done by the radical feminist movement. Many lost their jobs and none of them were able to find a publisher for their books. Men have been thrown out of their own houses and unjustly accused of domestic violence towards their partners, and some of sexually abusing their children. The legitimate interests of men in Western society are being systematically assaulted by radical feminists and this book goes a long way to providing the evidence.

Men are starting to campaign more effectively for their interests, though they have a long way to go before they halt the tide of radical feminist influence, let alone start to reverse it. Feminists can also expect more challenging from another quarter. An increasing number of women are summoning up the courage to openly criticise them. This shouldn’t surprise us, given that the vast majority of women don’t share the radical feminists’ political ideology.

With every year that passes more women become aware of the damage man-hating and family-hating radical feminists wreak on society in general, and women’s interests in particular. These women are becoming more vocal, and their number is on the rise… How much more damage will feminists be allowed to wreak before they’re more widely recognised as the evil women they are?”

My other books are Guitar Gods in Beds. (Bedfordshire: A Heavenly County (2008), David and Goliatha (David Cameron: heir to Harman?) (2010), Two Men in a Car (A Businessman, a Chauffeur, and Their Holidays in France) (2011), The Glass Ceiling Delusion: The Real Reasons More Women Don’t Reach Senior Positions (2011), 2015 general election manifesto of J4MB (only available as an ebook). The front covers:

Our final general election manifesto was published in 2022, a few months before we disestablished J4MB as a political party (in 2023).

Hopefully it doesn’t need me to explain the “David” in David and Goliatha is David Cameron and “Goliatha” is Harriet Harman, the first Minister for Women in the UK, in the first of Tony Blair’s three successive Labour administrations, in 1997. The English cartoonist and illustrator Martin Honeysett had long been a master at drawing grotesque women in particular, so he naturally came to my mind to depict Harman. He was delighted to be commissioned to draw the cartoon (he was 67 years of age at the time, my age at the moment) for a modest fee. He was no fan of Cameron or The Harperson, it soon emerged, and he was a delight to work with. It took him a few attempts, but finally he produced the image you see above. Sadly, Martin died in 2015.

I’ve just started work on a new book, one of two or three I hope to publish within the next two years.

—————————-

If you’d like email notifications of our new blog pieces, please enter your email address in the box near the top of the right-hand column and click ‘Subscribe’.

We shall shortly be posting this piece on our X channel.

Our YouTube channel is here.