Pattinson is the man who wrote Humphrey Lyttelton's scripts for I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and this book is a compilation of the descriptions of towns with which Lyttelton would introduce the programme.
Humph was a master of the double entendre and this book has a great selection of those. It also slags off every town. But somehow, reading the same basic joke time and again just gets boring. As a minute long introduction to a weekly programme this humour is often laugh aloud but in a book it gets a little boring.
Disappointing.
March 2012; 221 pages
Saturday, 31 March 2012
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
"Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel
I have read Mantel's Beyond Black and thoroughly enjoyed it but Wolf Hall is such a doorstep of a book that I thought I would find it tedious.
For at least the first hundred pages it was a historical bio-epic of no especial literary merit. I was interested by the character of Thomas Cromwell, depicted sympathetically rather than the black-garbed devil of historical propaganda. I was slightly annoyed by the first person narrative in the third person: Cromwell refers to himself as 'he' but it is written entirely from his point of view and you think his thoughts.
Then I began to seriously identify with his character. As Deputy to a larger than life Headteacher I have been the fixer, the manager, the creator of possibilities and sometimes the hitman, always surviving within and by the favour of my boss. And yesterday at a meeting I started thinking to myself: 'What would Cromwell do in this situation'.
I was also desperate to find out what happened to him and why the novel is named Wolf Hall.
When a character in a book grabs you so completely then you have to admit that somehow the novelist has become a magician and you are enchanted by her spells. And that is why it was shortlisted for the Costa Award in 2009, the Women's Prize for fiction in 2010 and won the Booker Prize (2009) and the inaugural Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2010.
Page turner.
March 2012; 650 pages
For at least the first hundred pages it was a historical bio-epic of no especial literary merit. I was interested by the character of Thomas Cromwell, depicted sympathetically rather than the black-garbed devil of historical propaganda. I was slightly annoyed by the first person narrative in the third person: Cromwell refers to himself as 'he' but it is written entirely from his point of view and you think his thoughts.
Then I began to seriously identify with his character. As Deputy to a larger than life Headteacher I have been the fixer, the manager, the creator of possibilities and sometimes the hitman, always surviving within and by the favour of my boss. And yesterday at a meeting I started thinking to myself: 'What would Cromwell do in this situation'.
I was also desperate to find out what happened to him and why the novel is named Wolf Hall.
When a character in a book grabs you so completely then you have to admit that somehow the novelist has become a magician and you are enchanted by her spells. And that is why it was shortlisted for the Costa Award in 2009, the Women's Prize for fiction in 2010 and won the Booker Prize (2009) and the inaugural Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction in 2010.
Page turner.
March 2012; 650 pages
Monday, 19 March 2012
"Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War" by John Stubbs
It wasn't what I was expecting!
I thought in terms of straight history explaining the Cavalier but this was more a multiple biography, meandering from character to character.
It starts during the civil war when Captain Chudleigh, a messenger from the Royalist army at York, meets Davenant, Jermyn and Suckling in London.
We then reverse to the days of James I to someone called Carew, a young man who finds it difficult to settle into a career but enjoys writing poetry (and who during the Civil War rests in Wrest Park). We learn about Prince Charles trip to Spain to woo the Infanta da Castille (unsuccessfully) in the company of three other friends including the soon-to-be Duke of Buckingham. And we learn of Buckingham's subsequent career and assassination. Someone called Herrick who later becomes a country parson is working for the Duke. And so we start discovering that all these characters are known to the future because of their literary connections.
The two key characters are aristocratic gambler and petty poet Sir John Suckling (who is a known coward but soldier and cavalier and roue about town) and William Davenant, son of an Oxford innkeeper (and sometime Mayor) but godson (and illegitimate son?) of William Shakespeare who became a friend of Ben Jonson, a poet and playwright, a cavalier and courtier, famed for inhaling Mercury as a cure for syphilis which caused his nose to drop off, a fixer and smuggler during the Civil War, a failed coloniser of New Jersey, and the man who restored the Theatre during the restoration. But these two weave in and out of a huge cast. As well as Herrick we meet Milton, Marvell and Dryden, we meet Aubrey and Lovelace ("Stone Walls do not a Prison make nor Iron Bars a Cage") and Archbishop Usher of Armagh who calculated the age of the Earth, Izaak Walton (who as well as being a keen angler was part of the chain who smuggled Charles II's father's garter medal away from the failed Battle of Worcester, when Charles had to hide in the Oak, back to London to be reunited with its owner in exile abroad).
We find out about the English Olympics on Cotswold Hill and about Edward King who drowned on the way to Ireland and is famous for nothing else than the fact this his tragedy inspired Milton's Lycidas. We discover that near the start of the Civil War Queen Henrietta Marie spends a night with Shakespeare's daughter at New Place in Stratford. We learn about the great Viscount Falkland, England's first atheist, whose philosophical circle at Great Tew was destroyed by the Civil War; and how his legacy lived on when the Earl of Newcastle, a Cavendish, married a philosophical lady whose tutor was Thomas Hobbes and who spawned the scientific Cavendishes.
One whom I was ashamed never to have heard of was a neurotic Calvinist in Edinburgh named Archibald Johnston who practised law and, through chance as much as anything, became a co-author of the Scottish Covenant and thus one of the Scots whose interventions tipped the crown from Charles' head.
In short this is a ragbag of a book, full of strange characters. It reminded me of God's Philosophers. It hangs together through an extraordinary narrative. People come and go, they wander in and out, like some chaotic play. And in the final analysis they gave birth to so much English poetry and so much of the modern world.
March 2012; 470 pages
I thought in terms of straight history explaining the Cavalier but this was more a multiple biography, meandering from character to character.
It starts during the civil war when Captain Chudleigh, a messenger from the Royalist army at York, meets Davenant, Jermyn and Suckling in London.
We then reverse to the days of James I to someone called Carew, a young man who finds it difficult to settle into a career but enjoys writing poetry (and who during the Civil War rests in Wrest Park). We learn about Prince Charles trip to Spain to woo the Infanta da Castille (unsuccessfully) in the company of three other friends including the soon-to-be Duke of Buckingham. And we learn of Buckingham's subsequent career and assassination. Someone called Herrick who later becomes a country parson is working for the Duke. And so we start discovering that all these characters are known to the future because of their literary connections.
The two key characters are aristocratic gambler and petty poet Sir John Suckling (who is a known coward but soldier and cavalier and roue about town) and William Davenant, son of an Oxford innkeeper (and sometime Mayor) but godson (and illegitimate son?) of William Shakespeare who became a friend of Ben Jonson, a poet and playwright, a cavalier and courtier, famed for inhaling Mercury as a cure for syphilis which caused his nose to drop off, a fixer and smuggler during the Civil War, a failed coloniser of New Jersey, and the man who restored the Theatre during the restoration. But these two weave in and out of a huge cast. As well as Herrick we meet Milton, Marvell and Dryden, we meet Aubrey and Lovelace ("Stone Walls do not a Prison make nor Iron Bars a Cage") and Archbishop Usher of Armagh who calculated the age of the Earth, Izaak Walton (who as well as being a keen angler was part of the chain who smuggled Charles II's father's garter medal away from the failed Battle of Worcester, when Charles had to hide in the Oak, back to London to be reunited with its owner in exile abroad).
We find out about the English Olympics on Cotswold Hill and about Edward King who drowned on the way to Ireland and is famous for nothing else than the fact this his tragedy inspired Milton's Lycidas. We discover that near the start of the Civil War Queen Henrietta Marie spends a night with Shakespeare's daughter at New Place in Stratford. We learn about the great Viscount Falkland, England's first atheist, whose philosophical circle at Great Tew was destroyed by the Civil War; and how his legacy lived on when the Earl of Newcastle, a Cavendish, married a philosophical lady whose tutor was Thomas Hobbes and who spawned the scientific Cavendishes.
One whom I was ashamed never to have heard of was a neurotic Calvinist in Edinburgh named Archibald Johnston who practised law and, through chance as much as anything, became a co-author of the Scottish Covenant and thus one of the Scots whose interventions tipped the crown from Charles' head.
In short this is a ragbag of a book, full of strange characters. It reminded me of God's Philosophers. It hangs together through an extraordinary narrative. People come and go, they wander in and out, like some chaotic play. And in the final analysis they gave birth to so much English poetry and so much of the modern world.
March 2012; 470 pages
Sunday, 11 March 2012
"Notes from Underground" by Fyodor Dostoevsky
This slender Dostoevsky is a book of two halves. The first half is a philosophical tract written by a disillusioned embittered man who lives like a mouse under the floorboards hidden from the society that rejects him without even noticing him, plotting his revenge. But he is so full of introspection that he cannot act.
The second half is a fragment of a memoir about how he meets up with some old school friends whom he dislikes, how he acts the bitter rude boor, how he follows them to a brothel (but they give him the slip) and talks to a young fresh girl, how she subsequently comes to his flat whilst he is in a dispute with his servant, and how he (apparently) rapes her. Thus he spoils what his philosophical arguments tell him should not be spoiled. Thus he rejects any hand of friendship, compassion or love. And presumably thus he dooms himself to eternal punishment in his own private hell under the floorboards for the rest of his life.
The first half I found nearly unreadable; the second almost disappointingly short.
March 2012; 115 pages
Saturday, 10 March 2012
"Nudge" by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein
This 'hugely influential' book is really rather limited and boring.
These are the big ideas. None are original.
They need to spend some time defending libertarian paternalism from the American right. They argue that it is better that government should nudge us to do what is in our own best interest rather than to force us to do this. They suggest that not all government officials are necessarily incompetent or corrupt. (I think they could go quite a way further here and suggest that it is more likely that a civil servant will try to influence your choice in a way that is good and positive than that a capitalist seeking to maximise the profit of himself or his shareholders will. They do say: "One the face of it, it is odd to say that the public [choice] architects are always more dangerous than the private ones. After all, managers in the public sector have to answer to voters, and managers in the private sector have as their mandate the job of maximizing profits and share prices, not consumer welfare. Indeed, some of those who are most suspicious of governments think that the only responsibility of private managers is to maximise share prices." (p238) )
So far the book has been interesting though not revolutionary. The test of the pudding as always is in the eating. Here they apply their theories to a variety of spheres (health care, pensions, sub-prime mortgages etc; mostly from a US perspective). What do they come up with in terms of practical advice?
To keep choice architects on the side of the angels they suggest the slightly novel moral principle (they credit it to the moral philosopher John Rawls) that you should only do what you would not be embarrassed about. If you place mirrors into restaurants to nudge people into eating less you might be happy for this idea to be publicised; you might be less happy if you had used subliminal advertising to achieve the same end.
So overall this was an interesting book although I had encountered most of its ideas before and the practical applications do seem rather limited. I hope there is more potential for the essential idea.
March 2012; 260 pages
These are the big ideas. None are original.
- Human beings are not as rational as the ideal consumer portrayed by Economists.
- Therefore, humans make choices based on rules of thumb such as
- Anchoring (based on the latest information you have; they demonstrate this by asking you to add 200 to the last 3 digits of your telephone number and guess whether Attila the Hun sacked Europe before or after this date; strangely for me the right answer was exactly equal to the last three digits of my telephone number added to 200!);
- Availability (we choose based on the evidence most readily available to us such as the horrendous aeroplane crash in the tabloids),
- Conforming to others,
- Overconfidence,
- the fact that we would rather avoid Losses than make Gains,
- seeking false patterns in random data,
- and sticking to the Status Quo.
- (All of these ideas are much better covered in Stuart Sutherland's Irrationality.)
- A choice architect designs the way we are presented with a choice. There is no such thing as a neutral choice.
- A choice architect can therefore influence our choice by manipulating the choice architecture in line with the rules of thumb. This is a nudge.
- This is morally acceptable within the framework of libertarian paternalism if the nudges influence us to make choices that are in our own best interests. Our best interests can be demonstrated: no one ever makes a New Year's resolution to start smoking or exercise less.
They need to spend some time defending libertarian paternalism from the American right. They argue that it is better that government should nudge us to do what is in our own best interest rather than to force us to do this. They suggest that not all government officials are necessarily incompetent or corrupt. (I think they could go quite a way further here and suggest that it is more likely that a civil servant will try to influence your choice in a way that is good and positive than that a capitalist seeking to maximise the profit of himself or his shareholders will. They do say: "One the face of it, it is odd to say that the public [choice] architects are always more dangerous than the private ones. After all, managers in the public sector have to answer to voters, and managers in the private sector have as their mandate the job of maximizing profits and share prices, not consumer welfare. Indeed, some of those who are most suspicious of governments think that the only responsibility of private managers is to maximise share prices." (p238) )
So far the book has been interesting though not revolutionary. The test of the pudding as always is in the eating. Here they apply their theories to a variety of spheres (health care, pensions, sub-prime mortgages etc; mostly from a US perspective). What do they come up with in terms of practical advice?
- Default options are important but especially so when it becomes difficult to choose. Madly (because of fears of being sued) the default prescription option for seniors under the Bush health care legislation was to pick a plan at random even though in healthcare the past is a pretty good indicator of the future.
- Transparency is good. They recommend that for investment plans etc banks are required to send annual statements detailing all charges to prompt people to consider whether they really made a good choice before. Generally information is good although when the choice becomes complex it becomes critical as to what information you present and how your present it. This too is part of choice architecture.
- Escalators are good. People are more likely to save for their pensions if they are asked to set aside a small amount now with a commitment to an automatic increase every time they get a pay rise.
To keep choice architects on the side of the angels they suggest the slightly novel moral principle (they credit it to the moral philosopher John Rawls) that you should only do what you would not be embarrassed about. If you place mirrors into restaurants to nudge people into eating less you might be happy for this idea to be publicised; you might be less happy if you had used subliminal advertising to achieve the same end.
So overall this was an interesting book although I had encountered most of its ideas before and the practical applications do seem rather limited. I hope there is more potential for the essential idea.
March 2012; 260 pages
Sunday, 4 March 2012
"The Admiral Benbow" by Sam Willis
The Admiral Benbow is the name of the pub owned by Jim Hawkins and his mother where Billy Bones comes to stay before being found by Blind Pew in Treasure Island. John Benbow was also a naval legend.
Born around 1652 during the Commonwealth, there is little of certainty about John Benbow's early life. He may have worked on merchant boats on the Severn. He certainly saw some service in the Navy, fighting the corsairs of Algiers and defending the English colony of Tangiers (with Bombay, part of the dowry of Charles II's queen) becoming a skilled pilot. He may have been on of the unnamed pilots who guided William of Orange's invasion fleet through the Straits of Dover to land at Torbay at the start of the last successful naval invasion of England. Certainly his first patron, under whom he had served in the Navy, was Admiral Herbert who carried the letter signed by the seven conspirators inviting William to England.
Benbow's subsequent career was as a fighting captain who aggressively raided the French coast in 1693 and 1694 during the Nine Years' War before the Treaty of Ryswick of . He was also a skilled manager of both the Chatham dockyard and subsequently the Deptford dockyard. While at Deptford he leased John Evelyn's house at Sayes Court for three years during which period he was persuaded to sub-let it to Czar Peter the Great of Russia who was studying British dockyards as part of his grand tour of Europe. Also at this time Benbow was fast-tracked to become an Elder Brethren of Trinity House and served on the committee overseeing the construction of the great Naval Hospital at Greenwich by Christopher Wren; Newton was also on the committee and the bricks were supplied by factory owner Daniel Foe who later became famous for writing the great maritime romance of Robinson Crusoe.
Later he was sent on a reconnoitring voyage of the inadequately charted West Indies. On the outbound voyage he escorted Edmund Halley who was himself mapping magnetic variations. Whilst cruising the Caribbean he searched for pirate Captain Kidd who was subsequently apprehended in New York and negotiated with the colonists of the doomed Scottish colony of Darien which bankrupted that country, forcing it into union with England so the Bank of England would pay their debts. (Strange how history repeats itself differently; the Scots banks have now again done their best to bankrupt England and they want their independence on the back of it!). Finally Benbow received mortal injuries in the first naval engagement of the Anglo-French War of Spanish Succession whilst his captains mutinied. The subsequent court martial became the first naval trial to be published in the newspapers, appearing a few months after the launch of the first English language regular newspaper the Daily Courant.
This was a rattling good yarn despite the frankly speculative nature of Benbow's early life and presents the story of a consummate sailor who was one of the first of a great tradition. It also mentions Hawke House in Sunbury-on-Thames!
March 2012; 318 pages
Born around 1652 during the Commonwealth, there is little of certainty about John Benbow's early life. He may have worked on merchant boats on the Severn. He certainly saw some service in the Navy, fighting the corsairs of Algiers and defending the English colony of Tangiers (with Bombay, part of the dowry of Charles II's queen) becoming a skilled pilot. He may have been on of the unnamed pilots who guided William of Orange's invasion fleet through the Straits of Dover to land at Torbay at the start of the last successful naval invasion of England. Certainly his first patron, under whom he had served in the Navy, was Admiral Herbert who carried the letter signed by the seven conspirators inviting William to England.
Benbow's subsequent career was as a fighting captain who aggressively raided the French coast in 1693 and 1694 during the Nine Years' War before the Treaty of Ryswick of . He was also a skilled manager of both the Chatham dockyard and subsequently the Deptford dockyard. While at Deptford he leased John Evelyn's house at Sayes Court for three years during which period he was persuaded to sub-let it to Czar Peter the Great of Russia who was studying British dockyards as part of his grand tour of Europe. Also at this time Benbow was fast-tracked to become an Elder Brethren of Trinity House and served on the committee overseeing the construction of the great Naval Hospital at Greenwich by Christopher Wren; Newton was also on the committee and the bricks were supplied by factory owner Daniel Foe who later became famous for writing the great maritime romance of Robinson Crusoe.
Later he was sent on a reconnoitring voyage of the inadequately charted West Indies. On the outbound voyage he escorted Edmund Halley who was himself mapping magnetic variations. Whilst cruising the Caribbean he searched for pirate Captain Kidd who was subsequently apprehended in New York and negotiated with the colonists of the doomed Scottish colony of Darien which bankrupted that country, forcing it into union with England so the Bank of England would pay their debts. (Strange how history repeats itself differently; the Scots banks have now again done their best to bankrupt England and they want their independence on the back of it!). Finally Benbow received mortal injuries in the first naval engagement of the Anglo-French War of Spanish Succession whilst his captains mutinied. The subsequent court martial became the first naval trial to be published in the newspapers, appearing a few months after the launch of the first English language regular newspaper the Daily Courant.
This was a rattling good yarn despite the frankly speculative nature of Benbow's early life and presents the story of a consummate sailor who was one of the first of a great tradition. It also mentions Hawke House in Sunbury-on-Thames!
March 2012; 318 pages
Friday, 24 February 2012
"The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson
The story of serial killer H. H. Holmes is interleaved with that of the creation, life and destruction of the Chicago World Fair of 1893; the 'Castle' of Holmes with its basement torture room, its crematorium kiln and its sealed gas chamber was a few blocks from the Fair.
The story is full of characters. The main protagonists are murderer Holmes, architect Burnham (the first architect of skyscrapers which began in Chicago and also the architect of New York's Flatiron building) and Landscape Gardener Olmsted (who also designed Central Park). 'Also starring' are Buffalo Bill whose Wild West Show was set up opposite the Fair and drew bigger crowds; Ferris who invented his wheel to be the Fair's answer to Eiffel's Tower; Frank Lloyd Wright, a young architect in a rival to Burnham's Chicago firm who was fired by his boss Louis Sullivan; and Patrick Prendergast, a mad Irishman who assassinated Chicago's mayor just before the closing of the Fair. Walk on parts include incandescent bulbs powered by ac, Juicy Fruit chewing gum, Elias Disney, the father of Walt, who worked on the Fair; Shredded Wheat and even the Titanic.
But the reason I read this big book in two obsessive days is the power of the writing. The author weaves his story magnificently, dropping little hins about the triumphs and tragedies to come. And he has some wonderfully purple moments:
And some great quotes:
A brilliantly written book that contrasts the light and the dark at every turn.
February 2012; 442 pages
The story is full of characters. The main protagonists are murderer Holmes, architect Burnham (the first architect of skyscrapers which began in Chicago and also the architect of New York's Flatiron building) and Landscape Gardener Olmsted (who also designed Central Park). 'Also starring' are Buffalo Bill whose Wild West Show was set up opposite the Fair and drew bigger crowds; Ferris who invented his wheel to be the Fair's answer to Eiffel's Tower; Frank Lloyd Wright, a young architect in a rival to Burnham's Chicago firm who was fired by his boss Louis Sullivan; and Patrick Prendergast, a mad Irishman who assassinated Chicago's mayor just before the closing of the Fair. Walk on parts include incandescent bulbs powered by ac, Juicy Fruit chewing gum, Elias Disney, the father of Walt, who worked on the Fair; Shredded Wheat and even the Titanic.
But the reason I read this big book in two obsessive days is the power of the writing. The author weaves his story magnificently, dropping little hins about the triumphs and tragedies to come. And he has some wonderfully purple moments:
- "Daylight faded to thin broth." (p30)
- "For this buttoned-up age .... it was a letter that could have steamed itself open." (p257)
And some great quotes:
- "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." Daniel H Burnham
- "Damn your preambles! Get down to facts." Richard M Hunt
A brilliantly written book that contrasts the light and the dark at every turn.
February 2012; 442 pages
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
"50 Digital Ideas you really need to know" by Tom Chatfield
This series is very up and down. Some of the books are brilliant (Philosophy, Physics, Maths), some have got lots of good bits (Economics) and some have the occasional nugget of gold within considerable yawn (Literature). This is in the third category.
Bizarrely, Chatfield tackles each of the issues in terms of their history which, in the context of the internet, dates back to the old pre-web days of the 1980s. Sometimes he goes back all the way to the birth of computing. I suppose this was a good tactic because I knew less about this than anything else. Where I had some knowledge of a topic his necessarily shallow approach added very little to what I knew so I had little new to think about.
Disappointing. Useful for reference.
February 2012; 203 pages
Bizarrely, Chatfield tackles each of the issues in terms of their history which, in the context of the internet, dates back to the old pre-web days of the 1980s. Sometimes he goes back all the way to the birth of computing. I suppose this was a good tactic because I knew less about this than anything else. Where I had some knowledge of a topic his necessarily shallow approach added very little to what I knew so I had little new to think about.
Disappointing. Useful for reference.
February 2012; 203 pages
Saturday, 18 February 2012
"Pigeon English" by Stephen Kelman
Harrison lives with Mamma and Lydia. They have just arrived in London from Ghana; Mum is a midwife, Dad is still in Ghana with baby sister. Mum has to pay off Aunt Sonia's boyfriend Julius, a thuggish debt collector and people trafficker. Harri is learning about Britain and school and growing up in year 7.
There is so much to learn and the environment is dangerous. Ex Army Terry Takeway and his dog Asbo steal. Harri wants to join Killa's gang but initiation means doing bad things including mugging an old man from Harri's church. Miquita teaches Harri how to kiss. And Harri talks to the pigeon who becomes his guardian angel.
Harri and friend Dean decide to detect the murderer of a dead boy. As they stumble across clues they don't understand they place themselves further and further in peril. It is almost a race to see whether Harri will lose his life or his innocence first.
A well-crafted novel told from the point of view of a young boy who has so much potential in a world which has so much to lose.
This book was nominated for the 2011 Booker along with Jamrach's Menagerie but they both lost to A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.
There is so much to learn and the environment is dangerous. Ex Army Terry Takeway and his dog Asbo steal. Harri wants to join Killa's gang but initiation means doing bad things including mugging an old man from Harri's church. Miquita teaches Harri how to kiss. And Harri talks to the pigeon who becomes his guardian angel.
Harri and friend Dean decide to detect the murderer of a dead boy. As they stumble across clues they don't understand they place themselves further and further in peril. It is almost a race to see whether Harri will lose his life or his innocence first.
A well-crafted novel told from the point of view of a young boy who has so much potential in a world which has so much to lose.
This book was nominated for the 2011 Booker along with Jamrach's Menagerie but they both lost to A Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes.
Friday, 17 February 2012
"Drink: A User's Guide" by Tom Hickman
This 'irreverent encyclopaedia' considers alcoholic beverages from every angle. We learn how they affect the body and how they are made. We learn the history of boozing and we learn about the various cultures. We learn about drunkeness and drunks and about alcohol and the law and famous drinkers. A huge compenium of facts and some very funny asides.
Chatty, witty and informative.
February 2012; 288 pages
Chatty, witty and informative.
February 2012; 288 pages
Thursday, 16 February 2012
"Obliquity" by John Kay
"Why our goals are best achieved indirectly."
Kay cleverly starts with what he calls "Franklin's Gambit". This is the assertion that we do not base our decisions on good reasons but that whatever we decide, we will subsequently find good reasons for backing our decision. This makes it hard to criticise this book. I didn't like it. Here are my reasons. But are they post hoc justifications for my instinctive dislike or are they the reasons which genuinely led up to my disliking this book?
I didn't like this book because I am suspicious of his evidence base. Like many such popular treatises he bases his arguments on selected anecdotes. As an economist he starts with examples where great businesses decide to focus on 'maximising shareholder value' and, he claims as a consequence' lost their way. He includes Boeing, ICI, Marks and Spencer and Merck as well as less known companies such as Litton Industries. But many great organisations lose their way and decline, partly because they fail to adapt to changing circumstances and partly no doubt purely because of regression to the mean. He is no doubt correct to analyse the failure of lobster fishery Prelude Corporation as down to the attempt to impose management methods from other industries to their own. As he points out: "You don't make fish, you hunt it. Your success depends on the flair, skills and initiative of people who cannot be effectively supervised" (p27).
He then broadens his argument to include Lenin's direct approach to modernising Russia and Le Corbusier's architecture to suggest that the direct approach to solving problems is always worse than the oblique approach. He suggests that anyone who believes that they can control a society or a complex business is both arrogant and unimaginative. And it is true that the Soviet Union collapsed and that many modernist buildings have been demolished. But Lenin and Stalin did (albeit brutally) drag a bankrupt, defeated, peasant nation into the industrial age despite the appalling trauma of the second world war.
Kay accepts that people need goals and objectives. But he seems to suggest that the goals should always be slightly off-target. Thus in golf: "you can only swing well when you can swing without thinking about it" (p43) which reminded me of Ian Botham's advice to partner Graham Dilley as they went out to bat with England following on and facing an innings defeat at Headingley in 1981: "Let's give it some humpty."
For Kay, the way to success is 'Muddling Through' and this does strike a chord with me. Kay equates muddling through with evolutionary adaptation which he sees as a slow, small step, incremental process. Darwinian Natural Selection, Kay points out, has no designer, no watchmaker (not even a blind one). And (going back to Frankiln's Gambit) teleological explanations for success are flawed: giraffes have long necks because they have long necks. "We find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation; directness where there is obliquity." (p118)
Kay has a lot of good points but he over eggs the pudding. He quotes Lord Kelvin as saying that "when you cannot measure something ... 'your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind'" (p71); Kay damns this as leading "directly to the modern curse of bogus quantification." (p71) But while he is correct to mock indices for things such as happiness this should not mean that you should fail to measure that which can and should be measured.
He makes an interesting point about optimism which goes against the prevailing wisdom that optimists are always the great winners who live longer and succeed more. He quotes Admiral James Stockdale who survived lengthy captivity as a Vietnamese prisoner and who observed that "those who died were typically optimists" (p126) because the dashing of their hopes left them nothing left to live for. Optimists need resilience it seems.
He admires the "pragmatic improvisation" (p128) of F D Roosevelt and gives him the line: 'Try something. If it fails admit it frankly and try another'; I had always been told that it was Truman who said apropos his policies: 'We'll just try them and if they don't work we'll try something else.'
He rightly complains about consistency and precedent. How often have I longed for a politician to say 'I've changed my mind'; this would be a sign of strength rather than the weakness the political journalists suggest. And he points out that the fear of setting a precedent can sometimes make it harder to do the right thing.
The idea that Quality Assurance is simply a way of finding reasons post hoc for what we know a priori works is naively oversimplistic. My maxim would be: 'If it ain't broke don't QA it'. QA's principal concern is not with justifying what is quality but with improving what is not quality. And the clever use of data is to ask questions not to find solutions. So if I study the performance tables for British schools in a scientific and enquiring way I may find patterns that prompt me to ask what might be the causes for various perceived effects.
Kay himself suggests limits to obliquity. George Soros has noticed that his back aches when he subconsciously perceives that something dodgy is happening. Awareness of this intuition enables him to investigate a situation more carefully. But Kay points out that Soros does not base his investment decisions on intuition but on careful analysis; even the hunch is based on years of laboriously acquired expertise.
Statements such as "Paris grew by muddling through, Brasilia by design; Paris is a great city, Brasilia is not." (p175) confirm that Kay's arguments lack depth. A lot of what people love about Paris are the great boulevards designed by Baron Hausmann. But even if the element of design within Paris was insubstantial, Kay still ignores the time frame. Possibly Paris was not a great city in its first century; evolution takes ages.
February 2012; 179 pages
Kay cleverly starts with what he calls "Franklin's Gambit". This is the assertion that we do not base our decisions on good reasons but that whatever we decide, we will subsequently find good reasons for backing our decision. This makes it hard to criticise this book. I didn't like it. Here are my reasons. But are they post hoc justifications for my instinctive dislike or are they the reasons which genuinely led up to my disliking this book?
I didn't like this book because I am suspicious of his evidence base. Like many such popular treatises he bases his arguments on selected anecdotes. As an economist he starts with examples where great businesses decide to focus on 'maximising shareholder value' and, he claims as a consequence' lost their way. He includes Boeing, ICI, Marks and Spencer and Merck as well as less known companies such as Litton Industries. But many great organisations lose their way and decline, partly because they fail to adapt to changing circumstances and partly no doubt purely because of regression to the mean. He is no doubt correct to analyse the failure of lobster fishery Prelude Corporation as down to the attempt to impose management methods from other industries to their own. As he points out: "You don't make fish, you hunt it. Your success depends on the flair, skills and initiative of people who cannot be effectively supervised" (p27).
He then broadens his argument to include Lenin's direct approach to modernising Russia and Le Corbusier's architecture to suggest that the direct approach to solving problems is always worse than the oblique approach. He suggests that anyone who believes that they can control a society or a complex business is both arrogant and unimaginative. And it is true that the Soviet Union collapsed and that many modernist buildings have been demolished. But Lenin and Stalin did (albeit brutally) drag a bankrupt, defeated, peasant nation into the industrial age despite the appalling trauma of the second world war.
Kay accepts that people need goals and objectives. But he seems to suggest that the goals should always be slightly off-target. Thus in golf: "you can only swing well when you can swing without thinking about it" (p43) which reminded me of Ian Botham's advice to partner Graham Dilley as they went out to bat with England following on and facing an innings defeat at Headingley in 1981: "Let's give it some humpty."
For Kay, the way to success is 'Muddling Through' and this does strike a chord with me. Kay equates muddling through with evolutionary adaptation which he sees as a slow, small step, incremental process. Darwinian Natural Selection, Kay points out, has no designer, no watchmaker (not even a blind one). And (going back to Frankiln's Gambit) teleological explanations for success are flawed: giraffes have long necks because they have long necks. "We find intentionality and design where there is only chance and improvisation; directness where there is obliquity." (p118)
Kay has a lot of good points but he over eggs the pudding. He quotes Lord Kelvin as saying that "when you cannot measure something ... 'your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind'" (p71); Kay damns this as leading "directly to the modern curse of bogus quantification." (p71) But while he is correct to mock indices for things such as happiness this should not mean that you should fail to measure that which can and should be measured.
He makes an interesting point about optimism which goes against the prevailing wisdom that optimists are always the great winners who live longer and succeed more. He quotes Admiral James Stockdale who survived lengthy captivity as a Vietnamese prisoner and who observed that "those who died were typically optimists" (p126) because the dashing of their hopes left them nothing left to live for. Optimists need resilience it seems.
He admires the "pragmatic improvisation" (p128) of F D Roosevelt and gives him the line: 'Try something. If it fails admit it frankly and try another'; I had always been told that it was Truman who said apropos his policies: 'We'll just try them and if they don't work we'll try something else.'
He rightly complains about consistency and precedent. How often have I longed for a politician to say 'I've changed my mind'; this would be a sign of strength rather than the weakness the political journalists suggest. And he points out that the fear of setting a precedent can sometimes make it harder to do the right thing.
The idea that Quality Assurance is simply a way of finding reasons post hoc for what we know a priori works is naively oversimplistic. My maxim would be: 'If it ain't broke don't QA it'. QA's principal concern is not with justifying what is quality but with improving what is not quality. And the clever use of data is to ask questions not to find solutions. So if I study the performance tables for British schools in a scientific and enquiring way I may find patterns that prompt me to ask what might be the causes for various perceived effects.
Kay himself suggests limits to obliquity. George Soros has noticed that his back aches when he subconsciously perceives that something dodgy is happening. Awareness of this intuition enables him to investigate a situation more carefully. But Kay points out that Soros does not base his investment decisions on intuition but on careful analysis; even the hunch is based on years of laboriously acquired expertise.
Statements such as "Paris grew by muddling through, Brasilia by design; Paris is a great city, Brasilia is not." (p175) confirm that Kay's arguments lack depth. A lot of what people love about Paris are the great boulevards designed by Baron Hausmann. But even if the element of design within Paris was insubstantial, Kay still ignores the time frame. Possibly Paris was not a great city in its first century; evolution takes ages.
February 2012; 179 pages
Sunday, 5 February 2012
"The Invention of Murder" by Judith Flanders
A thoroughly enjoyable book.
Flanders trawls through the famous and not-so-famous murders of the 1800s and shows how they provided fodder for the broadsheet and newspaper business, and for the writers of melodramas and novels. We discover that the hunger for a story led journalists then as well as now to downright lies, inventions and deceit. The Times especially never let truth stand in the way of a good story.
She shows how playwrights and novelists embroidered real details of sordid crimes into their work. She introduced me to a vast array of melodramas I had never heard of before. She shows how Dracula, written two years after Jack the Ripper, incorporates many elements of the Ripper crimes into the text. She traces the antecedents of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and The Moonstone and of Inspector Bucket in Dickens' Bleak House. This aspect of the book reminded me of James Shapiro's 1599 which similarly showed how events surrounding Shakespeare in 1599 provided the material for the plays he wrote in that year. What impressed me was how thin a line there is between cheap sensationalist fiction and works of art. Dickens (who loved a good murder) frequently crosses the border into melodrama. Perhaps the difference is simply in the quality of his prose, as revealed to me in The Haunted House where the stories contributed by Dickens, Collins and Mrs Gaskell are simply better written than those contributed by the other, now less well-known, writers. Quality tells in the end.
She is also remorseless in her evidence that the lower classes received a much lower standard of justice than the upper classes: judges were biased against the poor, they could not afford counsel (and in many trials they only ever got to speak in their own defence because there were not defence witnesses), and all-male, all-bourgeois jurors equated respectable prosperity with honesty. Most killers were desperate. "Helen Blackwood, a Glasgow prostitute, shared a room measuring eight feet by six feet four inches with her lover, two other prostitutes who stayed there intermittently and two homeless boys, aged nine and eleven, whom she let sleep under her bed. This was reality."
There are moments when laws were changed. She shows how the mass spectacle of public execution became abhorrent to many (especially since so many murderers were pathetic rather than evil and especially since so many hangmen were incompetent) and changed to 'private' executions inside the prison (which then hoisted a black flag). And there is the wonderful moment when Thornton, having been acquitted of murdering the woman he had sex with and having the charge of rape dropped (because the complainant is dead) is rearrested for 'appeal of murder' which was a type of private prosecution brought by the bereaved family. "When called upon to answer, whether guilty or not guilty, Thornton .... took a pair of gauntlets, put one on, throwing the other on the floor" thus challenging the complainant [who was only a boy] to Trial by Battle. He got off the third trial and emigrated to America, leading a blameless life thereafter.
There are moments of humour. One murderer called Palmer was known as the 'Rugeley Poisoner'. The good people of Rugeley applied to the Prime Minister to change the name of their town; he agreed on condition that they named it after himself, Palmerston.
It is a rollicking good read but it is made even more special by her deliciously dry sense of humour shown in numerous asides of which these are but a few:
Flanders trawls through the famous and not-so-famous murders of the 1800s and shows how they provided fodder for the broadsheet and newspaper business, and for the writers of melodramas and novels. We discover that the hunger for a story led journalists then as well as now to downright lies, inventions and deceit. The Times especially never let truth stand in the way of a good story.
She shows how playwrights and novelists embroidered real details of sordid crimes into their work. She introduced me to a vast array of melodramas I had never heard of before. She shows how Dracula, written two years after Jack the Ripper, incorporates many elements of the Ripper crimes into the text. She traces the antecedents of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and The Moonstone and of Inspector Bucket in Dickens' Bleak House. This aspect of the book reminded me of James Shapiro's 1599 which similarly showed how events surrounding Shakespeare in 1599 provided the material for the plays he wrote in that year. What impressed me was how thin a line there is between cheap sensationalist fiction and works of art. Dickens (who loved a good murder) frequently crosses the border into melodrama. Perhaps the difference is simply in the quality of his prose, as revealed to me in The Haunted House where the stories contributed by Dickens, Collins and Mrs Gaskell are simply better written than those contributed by the other, now less well-known, writers. Quality tells in the end.
She is also remorseless in her evidence that the lower classes received a much lower standard of justice than the upper classes: judges were biased against the poor, they could not afford counsel (and in many trials they only ever got to speak in their own defence because there were not defence witnesses), and all-male, all-bourgeois jurors equated respectable prosperity with honesty. Most killers were desperate. "Helen Blackwood, a Glasgow prostitute, shared a room measuring eight feet by six feet four inches with her lover, two other prostitutes who stayed there intermittently and two homeless boys, aged nine and eleven, whom she let sleep under her bed. This was reality."
There are moments when laws were changed. She shows how the mass spectacle of public execution became abhorrent to many (especially since so many murderers were pathetic rather than evil and especially since so many hangmen were incompetent) and changed to 'private' executions inside the prison (which then hoisted a black flag). And there is the wonderful moment when Thornton, having been acquitted of murdering the woman he had sex with and having the charge of rape dropped (because the complainant is dead) is rearrested for 'appeal of murder' which was a type of private prosecution brought by the bereaved family. "When called upon to answer, whether guilty or not guilty, Thornton .... took a pair of gauntlets, put one on, throwing the other on the floor" thus challenging the complainant [who was only a boy] to Trial by Battle. He got off the third trial and emigrated to America, leading a blameless life thereafter.
There are moments of humour. One murderer called Palmer was known as the 'Rugeley Poisoner'. The good people of Rugeley applied to the Prime Minister to change the name of their town; he agreed on condition that they named it after himself, Palmerston.
It is a rollicking good read but it is made even more special by her deliciously dry sense of humour shown in numerous asides of which these are but a few:
- "Wills had a knack for turning theatrical fiction into untheatrical theatre: his adaptation of Jane Eyre drops the novel's dramatically interrupted wedding scene; instead, Jane is informed of Rochester's previous marriage in a letter."
- "... a plot so confusing there is no real resolution because, I strongly suspect, the author could not quite work out what had happened and understandably did not want to read it over again."
- "... a notorious Secret Intelligence Office .... is so secret that the office has a brass plaque on the door: 'Secret Agent' it reads."
- A story has a swallowed suicide note discovered at post-mortem: "This may trump Paul Ferroll's confession left in his wife's grace for 'least likely place to leave a confession'."
- In another melodrama a female detective indulges "in that passion of all stage detectives, disguise, appearing as a nurse, a man and an Irish lad, as well as changing her frock (which fools everyone)."
- "The Daily News merely reported Martha Tabram's death as a 'supposed murder in Whitechapel' - which since the woman had been stabbed more than three dozen times seems to stretch the meaning of the word 'supposed' past breaking point."
- "The Times solemnly reported that the police were taking 'extra precautions': if they heard 'any cry of distress, such as 'Help', 'Murder' or 'Police', they are to hasten to the spot at once'. "What, one wonders, had their instructions been before?)
A fantastic book.
February 2012; 466 pages
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
"The Haunted House" by Charles Dickens and others
A man and his sister rent a house that is allegedly haunted. The servants have hysterics and are dismissed; they are replaced by friends of the principals. On Twelfth Night the company assembles to tell stories about the ghost that haunts each room although none of the stories are really about ghosts.
Each story is by a different author. Hesba Stretton tells a Mills and Boon type story about the unrequited love of a shallow woman: romantic and moralising simultaneously. George Augustus Sala tells a funny tale of a young man who destroys his chances of married happiness by shaking; this quite funny narrative is resolved with the wonderful line 'all this was but a dream'. Adelaide Anne Proctor writes in couplets about a nun who is tempted to escape from the cloister and leads a dissolute life before returning to discover that no-one has noticed her absence because the Virgin Mary has taken her place in the convent. Wilkie Collins narrates a yarn about a sea dog who is tied hand and foot in a boat filled with gunpowder that is about to be blown sky high. Charles Dickens recounts how a young schoolboy fantasises about having a seraglio: it all turns sour when his impoverished family have to send him to a poor school: apart from bearing witness to the extravagant sexuality underpinning Victorian prose this also seems to be a metaphor for the terrible time when the young Dickens was removed from school and sent to work in a blacking factory because his father was in debt. Finally Elizabeth Gaskell writes in dialect about an honest Yorkshire farming family and their fast son who goes to London and turns bad (very Great Expectations).
An intriguing collection of tales. It was instantly clear that the best authors are Dickens, Gaskell and Collins but the others keep the fantasy going.
January 2012; 121 pages
Each story is by a different author. Hesba Stretton tells a Mills and Boon type story about the unrequited love of a shallow woman: romantic and moralising simultaneously. George Augustus Sala tells a funny tale of a young man who destroys his chances of married happiness by shaking; this quite funny narrative is resolved with the wonderful line 'all this was but a dream'. Adelaide Anne Proctor writes in couplets about a nun who is tempted to escape from the cloister and leads a dissolute life before returning to discover that no-one has noticed her absence because the Virgin Mary has taken her place in the convent. Wilkie Collins narrates a yarn about a sea dog who is tied hand and foot in a boat filled with gunpowder that is about to be blown sky high. Charles Dickens recounts how a young schoolboy fantasises about having a seraglio: it all turns sour when his impoverished family have to send him to a poor school: apart from bearing witness to the extravagant sexuality underpinning Victorian prose this also seems to be a metaphor for the terrible time when the young Dickens was removed from school and sent to work in a blacking factory because his father was in debt. Finally Elizabeth Gaskell writes in dialect about an honest Yorkshire farming family and their fast son who goes to London and turns bad (very Great Expectations).
An intriguing collection of tales. It was instantly clear that the best authors are Dickens, Gaskell and Collins but the others keep the fantasy going.
January 2012; 121 pages
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