The prime minister’s potato and other essays

In this tender collection of essays, historian and curator Anne-Marie Condé expands her sights towards the less-curated corners of history to explore how the smallest fragments of the past – postcards, commemorative plates, pavements, potatoes – can echo with the weight of history. With a gaze that is both respectful and exacting, Condé searches for meaning not in the grand arcs of battles and statesmen, but in the overlooked and the seemingly ordinary. What results is a quietly stunning meditation on memory, materiality, and the stories we secretly carry.

Condé writes with a skilled combination of intellectual precision and emotional attunement. Though clearly grounded in deep archival knowledge, her prose is animated by an insatiable curiosity and sometimes childlike awe of the unseen. Condé does more than interpret objects – she meets them, and through them, the people whom they once touched. The titular potato becomes not just a novelty but also a portal to deeper questions about what we choose to remember and how we might honour lives that official history often forgets. Condé coaxes human complexity from the faintest traces and invites us to consider our immediate world more carefully, to find connection in allegedly idle things, and to approach the past not only with reverence but also with great affection. Hers is a voice that sees the mystical in the mundane, and the enduring presence of those who came before.

This is not just history. It is storytelling of the highest order: insightful, discerning, and quietly magical.