Shouting contests and bribery by beer – 10 fictional elections

From Shakespeare’s Coriolanus to Douglas Hurd’s thriller of a hung parliament and a surging SNP, John Dugdale on the great literary hustings

Britain has a rich tradition of election fiction, but the local contests described in Victorian novels have all but disappeared in the last 100 years, and it’s playwrights and thriller writers who now find material in polls and parliament rather than weighty, big-name novelists.

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