Ben Pile at Climate Resistance notes Steven Pinker's latest book:

In this startling new book, the bestselling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. With the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps, Pinker presents some astonishing numbers. Tribal warfare was nine times as deadly as war and genocide in the 20th century. The murder rate of Medieval Europe was more than thirty times what it is today. Slavery, sadistic punishments, and frivolous executions were unexceptionable features of life for millennia, then suddenly were targeted for abolition. Wars between developed countries have vanished, and even in the developing world, wars kill a fraction of the people they did a few decades ago. Rape, battering, hate crimes, deadly riots, child abuse, cruelty to animals—all substantially down.

Sounds good, and all very plausible. But how to explain it?

Thanks to the spread of government, literacy, trade, and cosmopolitanism, we increasingly control our impulses, empathize with others, bargain rather than plunder, debunk toxic ideologies, and deploy our powers of reason to reduce the temptations of violence.

I am not sure about that government bit. Perhaps "rule of law" might be more accurate. Perhaps the Amazon reviews can shed some light. Says one reviewer:

Pinker challenges the two prevailing views of human nature - Rousseau's view that the noble savage has been corrupted by civilization, and Hobbes's idea that human greed and violence can only be curbed by strong government. The first view is common on the left of the political spectrum, the second among conservatives. The reviewers who think poorly of the book may have been upset by the fact that Pinker rejects both positions. Instead he shows, with a mass of evidence and interpretation, that violence has declined through history. We seem likely to have started with the high levels of inter-group killing found in our chimpanzee cousins, eventually to be tamed by the slow development of effective government, peaceful trading and eventually Enlightenment thinking.

Says another:

Words like `democracy', `government' or `gentle commerce' are not seriously analyzed. Consequentially, his view of history is a very mechanical one: we were extremely violent in the past and thanks to the Leviathan and `gentle commerce' we have become better persons. We either accept the political and economical assets of our era or we risk going back to violence and chaos.

My sense is that Pinker's evidence for decreasing violence over time will be very interesting to see, but his explanations for why this is so will be less interesting. I think the answer is that technology makes us less violent, by making our lives overall so much more comfortable that violence seems even more out of the ordinary, and so to be avoided, than it otherwise would.

"I am not one of those who have ever flattered the people, or striven to win favour by telling them that from the Crown or from Parliament that could be got which could not be got from themselves, by themselves. I would impress upon you this. What the State gives to you, the State takes from you first; it further charges you with the cost of collection, and with the cost of distribution. Better by far that you should save for yourselves and spend for yourselves, than put into the purse of the State your earnings of which only part can at best come back."

- Charles Bradlaugh, 19th Century British parliamentarian and campaigner on issues such as rights of non-believers, contraception, the case against the monarchy, and as this quotation shows, an opponent of socialism. The quote is taken from a review of a book about Bradlaugh by Bryan Niblett, who is known to some of us at Samizdata. Bryan is an Objectivist (as in an admirer of the philosophy of Ayn Rand) and has worked for many years as a private arbitrator concerning areas such as intellectual property. A very good and smart man all round, in fact.

I have already quoted from and commented on The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824 a couple of times here. Now I've read it. Unless I'm being paid to read a book, I only read it to the end if I'm enjoying it, so point one to make about this book is that I wasn't paid to read it. Samizdata writers and readers are not brought together by a shared fascination for classical music and the world in which it was created and had its first impact, so I don't know if you would also enjoy reading this book. But I can say a bit about why I did.

I know Beethoven's music, and the Ninth Symphony in particular, quite well, possessing as I do a large classical CD collection containing lots of Beethoven and more than a few recordings of the Ninth. A painlessly entertaining way to learn more about classical music in general, and Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony in particular, is, for me, always welcome. This book was painless partly because it is all written in a language I can easily follow, English. Many books about classical music use lots of musical notation. I can just about decipher such symbols, but seldom with the fluency that is necessary immediately to get the points an author is trying to make with them. Sachs could easily have peppered his text with such hieroglyphics, having himself been a conductor before he became a writer. He did not. He relied on words. He also avoids using Italian words, saying very loud rather than fortissimo, and so on.

This book is also painless in being quite short. 225 pages, including all the extras. I'm a slow reader, so that, for me, was another plus.

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony itself famously includes words, in its particularly famous final choral movement, as well as just orchestral music. It is therefore entirely proper, when pondering the meaning and impact of this symphony, to think also about the general artistic atmosphere - involving such things as poetry and literature - that surrounded its creation and reception, rather than just, say, Beethoven's earlier pieces and the other music being composed at the time. More so, if anything. Nobody else was then writing music like Beethoven's, but the wider artistic ambience definitely chimed in with what Beethoven was trying to say with the Ninth. The Ninth, in its turn, reinforced these tendencies by setting them to music.

How accurately Sachs describes this general artistic ambience, I am not educated enough to say. But he at least convinces me that he knows what he is talking about. That I was doing something to fill a big gap in my knowledge of a crucial time in cultural, political and economic history, was yet another reason for me to be glad to have read this book.

The political story Sachs tells is of a continent aroused into radical enthusiasm by the French Revolution, but then disappointed both by that revolution's subsequent Napoleonic nature and then by its defeat by a coalition of anti-radical powers. The Napoleonic Wars were followed by a period of political reaction, all over Europe. In such a world, the liveliest minds shied away from real world politics and instead turned inwards. Instead of challenging the powers-that-were with riots and revolutions, they challenged them with Art, asserting the primacy of Great Artists over merely aristocratic inheritors of power. Power from within would trump the inherited privilege of the old aristocracy who remained, temporarily, in political command. (If that reminds you a bit of the history of the USSR, Sach agrees with you.)

The contemporary of Beethoven who came most alive for me, as a result of reading this book, was Byron. Poet, scored with lots of women, died fighting in Greece for … something or other. That was pretty much the limit of my knowledge of Byron. I don't know a lot more now, but I do know a bit more. The point of Byron's Greek enthusiasm being that supporting Greek resistance to the Turks was just about the only kind of radical enthusiasm you could publicly indulge in, and get away with. On the back of this peculiar gust of political emotion, Byron, himself a hereditary aristocrat (although he didn't know he would be that until he suddenly became that), became that very modern sort of figure, an international celebrity, with no official position but lots of influence. As Beethoven had already become. Other early nineteenth century artistic celebrities whom Sachs also writes about are: Stendal, Hegel, Pushkin, Delacroix and Heine, about all of whom, as with Byron, I now know a bit more than extremely little.

Like their confreres of our own time, these Great Artists were typically very scornful of those other sorts of new men, the money grubbing capitalists. Heine is quoted expressing lofty disdain for these mercenary oafs and their contemptible preference for mere entertainment over Art. This despite the fact that it was the new money of these mere tradesmen that, then more than now, was providing the Artists with their new found clout, either directly, or indirectly via the spending power of the greater number of state bureaucrats that their endeavours were making possible. The first performance of the Ninth was staged for a paying audience, and at least partly with the idea of easing Beethoven's money worries (so much for the notion that artists don't fret about mere money), rather than commissioned and all paid for by an aristocrat. The contrast with how the Eroica Symphony (number three of Beethoven's nine symphonies), as shown in the film Eroica that I referred to in an earlier Beethoven posting here, was extreme. The Eroica Symphony first exploded into the world, assuming Eroica has the story roughly right, in a large room in an aristocratic mansion, in front of an audience that was outnumbered by the orchestra. The premier of the Ninth differed from a classical concert nowadays in that the audience responded to the music more in the manner of a jazz audience nowadays, but nevertheless it was a much more modern occasion.

Not that Sachs spends much time describing that concert. He describes the music itself, in English, but now so much how the audience first received it. Describing classical music in English is a lot like writing about sex, being awfully liable to provoke unintended mirth, but Sachs does it pretty well. However, I learned more about the actual event itself, as opposed to the music, by reading the sleeve notes of one of those Ninth CDs of mine. Sachs is more concerned to describe the Ninth itself, the world that gave rise to the Ninth, and the impact upon the world that the Ninth then had. He writes about a great many years besides the year 1824, and many more afterwards, and includes a very good short biography of his hero.

As far as Beethoven's and the Ninth Symphony's impact is concerned, the personality who, for me, came most alive from reading the bits in this book about the decades after the Ninth Symphony was created was Richard Wagner. Sachs (perhaps his name got him paying particular attention to Wagner from an early age) entertainingly quotes Wagner patting Beethoven on the back for showing the world the way towards the artistic perfection that was "Music Theatre" (which is something entirely different from the Italian trash known as "opera"). Beethoven dipped his toe in the process of setting significant Words, expressive of profound philosophical ideas and profound spiritual and emotional sentiments, to music. Wagner perfected the process. According to Wagner, that is. Fair enough. When Wagner said the things Sachs quotes he was well into creating his great body of op … sorry, works of Music Theatre. Wagner's Great Artist posturings were all part of what made him a great artist, just as such ambitions did the same for Beethoven himself. Had Beethoven not stormed the musical heavens, would Wagner have been able to? We will never know, but the question is a good one, because it gives us a sense of Beethoven's colossal influence on everything that followed.

What I hadn't really taken in before, although I am sure I read through such things in all those CD sleeve notes of mine, was just how obsessed Wagner was with Beethoven's Ninth, his Ninth in particular, mentioning it constantly in his voluminous writings, and being constantly mentioned talking about it, right up to his own death, in the diaries left to us by Wagner's wife. Wagner launched the building of his brand new Bayreuth … Music Theatre in 1872 by performing this symphony, his point being: this is where Beethoven ended, and where I, Wagner, have taken over.

For somewhat different reasons, when the Bayreuth Festival was relaunched (following that embarrassing Nazi interlude) in 1951, Beethoven's Ninth was again performed. The point of that being that the impeccable Beethoven brand, as we would now say, would help to purge the much sullied Wagner brand.

As Sachs notes at both the beginning of and at the end of his book, Beethoven's music generally, and his Ninth Symphony in particular, is felt by almost everybody who responds to it to communicate and to represent all that is good about humanity and human aspirations. Every good cause of our own time (by which I simply mean a cause that thinks it's good) that can afford to (EUrope being the most famously obtrusive current example) basks in the moral aura cast by the Ninth. That so many of the great political villains of the twentieth century, of the sort alluded to in my previous paragraph, who between them did so much (as Sachs notes) to make us all think again about worshipping Great Men, used this music to confer moral grandeur upon their mega-slaughters, seems to do nothing to change this.

Sachs concludes his book with a little autobiographical essay along the lines of: What Beethoven Means To Me. Way back when he and his friends were protesting against the Vietnam War, Beethoven provided Sachs with his inspirational soundtrack. Again, fair enough, given that, crucially, Sachs does not say that Beethoven would, had he been alive now, have been on Sachs's side. Sachs merely says that it felt like that, as I am sure it did. Beethoven still sounds as if he is on your side, whoever you are. And no piece of his music did more to make this true than the Ninth.

This caught my attention, at a site called "The Smart Set".

"If the zeitgeist has a face, it supposedly belongs to Ayn Rand and her capitalist philosophy of Objectivism. Talk radio hosts adore the author’s demands for limited government; Congressman Paul Ryan insists that his staffers read her overstuffed opus Atlas Shrugged; picket signs at Tea Party rallies suggest that we all “READ AYN RAND.” And yet, some pieces are missing. Ayn Rand was anti-war, but spending for hundreds of military bases and two-and-a-half wars remains sacrosanct even as Congress made the debt ceiling a major issue. She found homosexuality “immoral” and “disgusting,” and yet gay marriage has regained the initiative in the public square. And Randian heroes are explicitly — nay, objectively — elitist. They are genius millionaire square-jawed heroes who walked right off the screen at the movie matinee. The average Tea Party rallier, not so much."

A bit of a jumble. Rand was anti-war, certainly, but she certainly was no pacifist, either about the Nazis or any other totalitarian regimes. She had a problem about homosexuality, but I doubt she favoured the state using its violence-backed powers to suppress it; indeed, from my reading of her journals and other material, I don't know if she had developed views on this subject at all. As for the line about her support for "elitism", it does rather depend on what you mean. For Rand, and most who broadly support her views (as I do), the idea was that people are entitled to develop their lives and talents to the greatest extent possible in free trade with their fellows. There is plenty of room for upward mobility, striving and competition. This has nothing to do with privilege, which is often what can be meant by an "elite", for example. (Elitism is, of course, a boo word for the egalitarian left, and I suspect the author of the piece tilts in that direction).

"There is another writer whose political and philosophical influence is finally being felt in the public sphere. You may have read one of his books as a child. His name is Robert A. Heinlein, and he wrote science fiction. He was a libertarian enamored of military might, a conservative who championed free love. His heroes are certainly competent. They're also folks who hack the systems in which they live, not elitists who abandon a corrupt world full of moochers and looters to worship the dollar as an end unto itself. And unlike Rand, most of Heinlein’s work is actually readable."

Some of this is true, though I don't think Heinlein was "enamoured" of military might; he understood that values need to be defended, of course, so to that extent he understood the warrior ethic and code, but he also understood the trader ethic, too. He was able to see how military codes develop and why they exist (his book, Starship Troopers, is about this very issue).

The idea that the characters in Rand's Atlas Shrugged "worship the dollar as an end unto itself" proves that the author of this article clearly has not thought straight. The point for Rand is that the dollar, preferably a gold-backed dollar, is a symbol of liberty, not something that you worship as a totem.

It is sometimes instructive when a writer from outside the usual field opines about something about which you know quite a lot, as I do about Rand and Heinlein, having read pretty much everything they wrote. The author of this article hits on some good points, so don't be put off by my nit-picking.

I have just posted the following review on Amazon.com of Paper Money Collapse. I only learned last night that the review embargo date had now arrived and that the time to be talking this book up is now, so this review was somewhat hastily written, although it is the result of quite a lot of thought. This was my very first review of any book on Amazon, and it shows, I'm afraid, particularly in my blundering attempts to italicise, which work here by those methods, but not there. Also, although I said I liked it, I didn't tick the box saying that I liked it. Can I do anything about any of that? Probably not. (LATER: actually, I now learn that you can edit these reviews. The italics thing now makes no sense!) Oh well, blog and learn, review on Amazon and learn. I will be amazed if I don't find myself wanting to say lots more about this book, but what follows is my first best shot.

An effort but definitely worth the effort - could be huge

I agree with the bit on the cover of this book where it says that this is not an easy read. For me, it has not been, and not just because the truths Schlichter spells out and explains are so not-easy to take. I am a huge fan of his, and have been ever since I first heard him talk about the analysis in this book in London about a year ago, but he makes me work hard. This book is heavy on logical exposition, much lighter on diverting anecdote. For the latter sort of Schlichter stuff, you must read his blog. 

One way to describe Paper Money Collapse might be to say that it is the sort of book that the great Austrian School economist and economic historian Murray Rothbard might have written, had he lived a bit longer. Last year I read Rothbard's Man, Economy and State. While doing this, I kept hoping that I would read a theoretical analysis of our current financial woes, as opposed merely to Rothbard's general take on Austrian Economics as a whole. I realise that this was a lot to ask of a book published several decades ago, and not surprisingly I was, although in general much educated, largely disappointed on that particular count. Well, what I was only hoping to read in that Rothbard book was what I did read in Detlev Schlichter's much shorter book, which I heartily recommend to anyone willing to really get stuck into it. Here is a conceptual analysis, in very much the painstaking Rothbard manner, of how non-commodity-backed currencies behave when they collapse, and why they do collapse, always, inevitably. In other words it is about the times we now live in. 

I learned a lot from reading Paper Money Collapse. In particular, Schlichter has convinced me of the wrongness of the argument that since we want economic activity in the world to increase indefinitely, but gold is, barring a few trivial further discoveries, fixed in quantity, gold won't work as the basis of currency. But non-elasticity is exactly why gold is such a good basis for currency. Totally elastic money, on the other hand, inevitably collapses, always and everywhere. Why should our elastic money be any different? 

Schlichter is not pointing the finger at individuals. This is not a detective story, where in the final chapter all the suspects are rounded up and Herr Schlichter points the finger at the guilty man. President Nixon's decision to break the final link between the dollar and gold is deplored, and Ben Bernanke's recent pronouncements are likewise disapproved of, but many of the decisions that lead to our current mess were made many, many decades ago, and by their nature they are the kind of decisions which are far easier to make than they are to reverse and clean up after. 

Nor does Schlichter believe that hyper-inflation now threatens us all because central bankers are unaware of the badness of hyper-inflation. They know that hyper-inflation is bad. Unfortunately, they also know that if the collapse that Schlichter describes occurs while they are in office, then that, for them, will be even worse than a bit more inflation or even quite a lot more inflation. So, they carry on printing money and postponing the resolution of the problem, which means that when nemesis does finally arrive, it will be all the worse. But, says Schlichter, they know what they are doing; they just don't know how to stop. Schlichter telling them to stop will accomplish nothing. 

I suspect that Schlichter may be being rather kind about just how plain stupid some even quite high ranking central bankers now are, but clever or stupid, these people are now thoroughly boxed in by their previous decisions and by the decisions of their predecessors of earlier years and decades. 

I have been using the phrase "paper money", as Schlichter himself does in his title. But as we all know, when central bankers now create yet more money, they are mostly putting numbers in electronically managed bank accounts. It is not the printing of bank notes that is the problem; it is the lack of a commodity base to control the process. By the same token, paper bank notes that refer to a currency that is solidly based on something like gold would be fine. But I am sure that Schlichter has thought long and hard about this phrase, and I gladly defer to his decision to call it "paper currency" in his title. I certainly don't know a better way of putting it. "Fiat" money? "Elastic" money? (That's the phrase that Schlichter switches to in the subtitle, also prominently displayed on the front cover.) Both are a bit more accurate than "paper" money, but are also a bit less attention-grabbing for the kind of intelligent and educated everyman whom Schlichter is trying to reach. "Paper" gets over the gist of the problem pretty well, I think. And you start learning what that means as soon as you read the sub-title. 

When it comes to Schlichter's pessimism about him personally having any influence on the conduct of public policy, I agree with him, in the short run. But I think he may be proved wrong, in the longer run. I agree with him that there is nothing much he can say to the people now in charge of financial policy that will persuade them to do the right thing now, which basically means getting the collapse over and done with as soon as possible. But when this collapse starts seriously happening anyway, in just the manner and for precisely the reasons that Schlichter says, he could then become a very Big Cheese, as we say in my native England. In fact, if this book does half as well as I suspect it may, Schlichter will probably be accused, by various paper (fiat, elastic) money idiots who know only the title of this book but nothing of what it says, of having precipitated the catastrophe he describes. But other people, including politicians and central bankers, could also then be asking him: So, Schlichter, what the hell do we do now? I urge Schlichter to be ready for this moment. Suggested title for his next book: Now What? (Presumed answer: Let non-state controlled and non-state backed bankers supply currency, which they will back with gold. Get out of their way and let them get on with it.) 

Meanwhile, I urge anyone who thinks that he might find this book enlightening, and helpful for personally navigating through the mess, to go ahead and be enlightened. I think this book may become very big. It certainly deserves to.

A Brief History of the Age of Steam: The Power That Drove The Industrial Revolution
Thomas Crump
Carroll & Graff, 2007, 370pp., paperback, $15.95 (but now much less - I got my copy for £3.99 in a remainder shop)

The best thing about this book from my British point of view is that it does not focus only on British events and circumstances. It surveys the entire world, as best it can in the space it allows itself. In most other stuff I can recall reading about the history of the steam engine, Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick, the British pioneers of steam engines during the eighteenth century (Trevithick being the first to build a steam engine that propelled itself along a track – in other words the maker of the first locomotive), are followed immediately by the heroic deeds of George Stephenson and IK Brunel, the mighty British railway pioneers of the Victorian age. Foreign places get mentioned because Stephenson's son did railways in them. Steamships are mentioned because Brunel also did them. But before you know it, you are being told about streamlined steam locos breaking speed records by hurtling from London to Scotland in the nineteen twenties and thirties, which was all good stuff but hardly central to the history of steam technology. By then, steam locomotives were a mature technology and soon to be an obsolete one.

In this book, by contrast, the steam engine arrives at its early nineteenth century state, but then the scene switches from Britain to North America. Steam engines, being still very heavy, made sense as the engines of big river boats on big American rivers well before they made sense as small locomotives on railway lines less than five feet apart. The USA, unlike Britain, has an abundance of huge rivers, in exactly the parts of the USA that were then developing most rapidly. The next chapter then concerns itself with rivers and canals (the two often being rather hard to distinguish) elsewhere in the world, most notably in central Europe, in particular in the form of the Rhine and its many reconstructions and appendages.

But already, I am getting ahead of the story. The first big job performed by steam engines was pumping water out of coal mines, the market that Newcomen catered to (1712 being the date of Newcomen's first installation), and then the one in which James Watt and his partner Matthew Boulton also got their start. Until Newcomen made his engine, many a British coal mine would have to cease operating, not because the coal had run out but because the coal that remained, often in large quantities, was under water. Any kind of mechanically powered pump, however expensive and inefficient, could make itself useful in circumstances like that, a classic niche market of just the kind that a cumbersome but clearly important new technology needs to get started.

Thomas Crump (and yes, that is a rather Victorian sounding name, isn't it?) does not make anything of the comparison, but the similarity between the early steam engines and the computers of our own time will strike anyone who reads this book. Steam engines started big and cumbersome. Then they got smaller and more powerful, thanks to a succession of technical innovations, and thanks to a general rise in engineering savvy and all-round craftsmanship. Not that this steam engine/computer parallel won't have occurred to Crump. It's merely that this book is published as one of a series called "A Brief History of …", and you often sense, sometimes because Crump comes right out and says it, that lots of interesting stuff is being left out.

Personally, given my technological ignorance, I would have appreciated just a few more pictures to explain how steam engines and their successive iterations and improvements actually worked. The big improvement that Watt made was that he contrived for the down beat of the steam engine to be powered, as well as the upbeat. And, he somehow made steam engines better at twiddling wheels than they had been hitherto. Another hugely important development was when they started using steam of much higher pressure, which is the sort of thing you can only do if the general standard of craftsmanship is high. A good idea like that in an unsatisfactory engineering environment is a recipe not for success, but for untimely explosions, of which there were plenty anyway. Later came the steam turbine, which means squirting a jet of steam at a big propellor, yes? A few more pictures might have fixed the details of these and other developments in my head a bit better, and also given a better idea of how big each of these things was, and what they looked like from the outside. The general point, however, I did get. The steam engine wasn't just one giant leap forward. It was a succession of important steps, resulting in a constantly improving power to weight ratio and a steadily widening range of applications. Crucial from the historical point of view was the moment when it was possible to put an engine on railway wheels that was powerful enough not only to drag itself along, but other loads also. But, there were plenty of other important moments in the story.

This, however, is a book which is strong on maps of railway systems and waterways in various parts of the world, less so on the ins and outs of the technology itself. That is because it is at least as much about the impact and context of the steam engine, about what circumstances made people invent and develop it and what they did with it, rather than merely what, in their various and successive forms, steam engines actually were. Never mind. The Internet (our internet mania being not unlike the mania that kicked off the railway age) is a big and most informative place, and at least I now know more of the words that I need to type into google to learn more.

I did enjoy the maps. One of my favourites shows the many early – pre-Stephenson's rocket - railways in the vicinity of the River Tyne (p. 149). The point being that the railway age had begun well before the Rocket made its first journeys between Stockton and Darlington in 1825. Railways as a technique for shifting stuff were actually centuries old by then, having a history that is entirely distinct from the matter of putting machines on them, to drag things along them. People, horses and gravity had been doing this for ages, until the late eighteenth century along rails made of timber rather than iron or steel. There are some very good pages about the development of rails to assist military engineers in their efforts to life earth out of trenches, and suchlike. The first application of the steam engine to railways was in the form of stationary engines at the end of short railway lines, dragging wagons along with ropes or chains.

That Tyneside map of ancient railways illustrates a general point about transport technology. Please now follow me along a slight digression.

I have long been fascinated by the ins and outs of the history of communications technology, which is of course heavily dependent upon transport, especially in the days when complicated messages could only travel as fast as a human message-carrier could. And a recurring story in the history of the technology of communication is how someone invents a new method of communicating, and everyone then says: hey, this is going to put a stop to … some earlier and much loved method of communication. Printed books, it was said, and then television, would kill the art of conversation. The internet will finish off books and television. And so on. But what really happens is that methods of communication combine and assist one another. People use emails not to stop meeting each other, but, among many other things, to arrange meetings and to continue the conversations started at those meetings. Television gives people new stuff to talk about, and it also sells books, for example the books on which television dramas are based. The internet doesn't kill off books either. On the contrary, one of the first mega-businesses of the Internet age is a bookstore. Physical books like this one that I am now writing about may in due course become a thing of the past, but virtual books will live on vigorously.

Similar things apply to transport. Someone invents a new way of travelling or of transporting stuff, but as likely as not and especially to begin with, the new system of transport revitalises the older methods rather than rendering them instantly obsolete.

What that map of the River Tyne shows is all the little railways which connected coal mines to … the River Tyne! The railways were all separate. They went downhill, with horses dragging the empty wagons up to the top again when they had been unloaded. Then, when the railway age as we now think of it got into its huge and interconnected and above all steam-driven stride, horses, far from being done away with, increased greatly in number, to transport people to and from railways stations, and to transport people into and within the huge new cities that the railways made all the huger. The horse population boomed in the steam age, before later forms of locomotion pushed both steam locomotives and horses, and smaller horse-drawn boats on smaller inland waterways, into the relative (but only relative) backwater than is the leisure industry.

Or consider those big rivers in America. There comes a point as you travel downstream on the upper reaches of such a river when it becomes navigable by ocean going ships, at which point there is invariably a big city where all the resulting loading and unloading gets done. But loading and unloading is cumbersome, especially in the absence of twentieth century cranes and the like. So instead, you can bind lots of little boats together, like so many tree trunks, and stick a super-powerful steam-powered tug boat on the front. Steam doesn't put a stop to smaller boats on smaller waterways. It instead greatly increases their productivity, even though the boats themselves are far too small to accommodate a steam engine actually on them. Are you thinking "containers"? Me too.

Railways and state power were always intermingled. In Britain, this mostly took the form of the politicking needed to contrive the lines of violated property rights that railways needed to get built at all. Then, the government was again "needed" (Crump has entirely conventional ideas about this) to compel railways to be operated more safely than might otherwise have happened quite so soon. Crump's political views seem to be conventionally centrist. He favours human advancement and prosperity, but takes it for granted that governments were needed to get railways started, and then to regulate them, impose safety regimes upon them, and so on. As a libertarian, I can't help wondering what might have happened to the steam age if landowners could simply have vetoed railways on their land if they felt inclined, and if those railways that did nevertheless materialise had been allowed to be as unsafe as their proprietors felt inclined for them to be. But, as is often said in pro-laissez-faire blogs like this one, the triumph of laissez-faire in the nineteenth century was only very partial.

In the USA, railways were all mixed up with the creation of new states of the union. Railways made it possible for new settlers to move in, and for them then to sell their produce to rest of the USA. And of course, railways played a huge part in the waging of the American Civil War, railway junctions, then and since, becoming important military objectives. I was charmed to read an oddly large number of pages in this book (pp. 140-146) about an amazing episode in the Civil War, upon which the movie The Great Locomotive Chase was based, which was one of the very first movies I ever saw. All I remembered, of course, was locomotives chasing one another. I didn't care why, and I assumed they'd made the whole story up. But not so. Now, I know more about who really was chasing whom and why. Many other late nineteenth century wars, with prominently featured railways, are referred to, most notably wars in China.

Railways and war is another topic that British-centric books about the steam age tend to neglect somewhat, apart from how the railways managed to keep going during World War 2 despite all the bombing, because British railways were probably more innocent of military motivation in their origins than the railways almost anywhere else in the world. In most countries, economic and national-strategic considerations tended to go hand in hand, giving rise to lots of financial corruption involving politically adept plutocrats, most especially in Russia, surprise surprise. In Russia the plutocrats got vast amounts of money from the government. In the USA, the plutocrats used their vast amounts of money to buy governments. The pattern in the world generally tended to be that the railways were built to aggrandise states and state military power, but then it was thought by the relevant national grandees, well, now that we've built these things, we might as well allow mere people to use these trains to transport themselves and their produce, if they would like to, which invariably many of them did.

I especially enjoyed the pages about Japan. I knew, very roughly, about how Commodore Perry first parked his ship off the coast of Japan and demanded that Japan get with the nineteenth century. I did not know, until I read this book, that when Perry made his second visit to Japan to sort out the details, he brought a train set with him:

Conforming to oriental custom, Perry, on his second visit, brought a variety of gifts, among which was a quarter-size model railway, complete with locomotive, tender and a carriage, with several miles of rails. The American visitors having laid a circular track - about a mile long - behind the reception hall at Yokohama, proceeded to show the assembled dignitaries what the train could do. They were overwhelmed. According to Perry's official record: 'Crowds of Japanese gathered around, and looked on the repeated circlings of the train with unabated pleasure and surprise, unable to repress a shout of delight at each blast of the steam whistle." One official actually rode the whole circuit, sitting on the roof of the diminutive carriage, and reported that the experience was 'most enjoyable'. Travelling at 20 mph was far beyond anything conceived possible in what was still a feudal state. ...

And the "assembled dignitaries" duly decreed that the railways should come to Japan. Their heads were full of armies which could then be transported hither and thither and which could then more easily rampage about in China and Korea. But much more entertaining, for me, was the story of how the new trains in Japan impacted upon the Japanese silk trade, which was the big economic story in Japan when the railways first arrived. When silk is first harvested, or whatever it is you do to silk when you first get your hands on it, you have then to spin it into silk thread very quickly. Wait more than a few hours and the silk stops working, apparently. This meant that the traditional Japanese silk industry required silk spinning, as well as harvesting, to be highly decentralised. Harvesting and spinning effectively had to be the one operation. But once railways started snaking their way across Japan, that all changed. Now it was possible to transport harvested silk to bigger, steam powered spinning … places, by train. If the train went through where you lived, then your silk harvesting stayed in business and prospered as never before. But if the train went elsewhere, your silk business collapsed. I knew nothing about any of this, until I read this book. In general, Crump observes, the railways centralised. They created huge new cities, with huge new business empires based in them, while causing many a small town to die.

In India, the same pattern was repeated, of politics leading and people following. The rulers, this time British, built their railways to do such things as suppress the Indian Mutiny, and then wondered if mere Indians might like to travel on them also. As many a dramatic photo tells us, Indians took to train travel with a passion. I am fond of writing at this blog about the game of cricket, which now serves as one of the great modern unifiers of India. Right up there with cricket is another British designed, Indian built wonder of the modern age, the Indian national railway system.

Ocean going liners figure prominently towards the end of Crump's story, as they should, and he credits Brunel with the key insight upon which the nature (very big) of modern ocean going steamships was based (p. 289):

Brunel, although no shipbuilder, had the fundamental insight that a substantial increase in size was the key to building a ship that could carry sufficient coal for crossing the Atlantic in either direction. Quite simply, with the increase of the dimensions of a vessel by any factor, its carrying capacity increases by the cube of that factor while the resistance to be overcome by its engine increases only by its square. With the help of this principle it is possible to determine the minimum dimensions of a steamship able to carry sufficient fuel for a voyage of any prescribed length - such as the distance involved in any Atlantic crossing.

This will seem banal to many of Samizdata's tech-savvy commentariat, but I had never before encountered this particular point about how much size matters, when it comes to steamships. Does any similar kind of principle apply to modern jet airliners, I wonder?

Crump makes much of the sinking of the Titanic, a story he tells at similar length (pp. 313-317) to his earlier telling of the story of the Great Locomotive Chase. His excuse is that the Titanic sinking drama illustrates the crucial contribution made by wireless telegraphy to ocean going liners and their voyages, and the "need" for the law to demand greater safety at sea. Had just one wireless telegrapher on a nearby ship been at work instead of having just a minute or two earlier gone to bed, all of the Titanic's passengers would have been saved. Having made a point of ignoring the movie-induced Titanic mania of recent years, I did not know this. Crump also earlier emphasised the contribution made by telegraphy of the wired sort to railways. Obviously communications technology is intimately mixed up with the story of transport, to the point where it is hard to separate the two. Think only of national newspapers and postal services everywhere, both impossible without the means to transport the messages.

A number of things make me suspect that this book was first written not as a history of the steam age generally, but rather as a history of the application of steam to transport. The final chapter, for example, is entitled: "The Eclipse of Steam Transport". Steam did utterly transform transport, but it did other things too, like spin that Japanese silk. Crump tells us little about how steam power was applied to making clothes, printing newspapers, and powering "industry" – i.e. industry of the sort that goes on inside huge and immobile factories. Crump describes steam engines before they climbed onto the rails, so to speak. And he also mentions the stationary steam engines that still throb away, still powered by coal and still generating the bulk of the modern world's electricity supplies. And, he makes the further point that steam power lives on in nuclear power stations, in the form of steam turbines supplied with steam heated by nuclear means. The steam age is still very much with us! But as a general observation, Crump tells us little about what steam did indoors during the railway and steamship age. I guess I should read this book.

Nevertheless, as you can surely tell, I enjoyed reading this book very much, being much more diverted by what it did say than in any way annoyed about anything it may plausibly be said to have omitted. That's usually the way with books reviewed by unpaid bloggers. Why read a book carefully enough to write about it if you aren't enjoying it?

I'll end this with a general point, about technology and technological history and about the people who made it, and continue to make it. One of the great intellectual divides of modern times is between those who take technological modernity for granted, and those who do not. Those of us who regularly write for or read Samizdata are surely in the latter camp. We know how much sheer graft, as well as intellectual insight and analysis, went into and goes into the development of steam engines, railway lines, steam locomotives, steamships, power stations, and cars and airplanes and computers and space rockets and nanotechnology and mobile phones and better washing up liquid and cheaper laser eye surgery and corn flakes, etc. etc. etc. We also know that the right economic policy setting is needed for such things to be devised, or even borrowed from elsewhere and applied. This stuff doesn't just design and make and operate itself. That much I do know about technology and its ongoing history, even if I know little of the technological detail, as I fear I have made only too clear in this review. This, fundamentally, is what I liked about this book. It celebrates the achievements of people who deserve to be celebrated, just as our current techno-wizards also deserve to be celebrated. True, a lot of what the steam age pioneers did was construct the technological sinews of war, as the book well explains. But that doesn't diminish the impressiveness of their achievements, or the debt that we, who are fortunate to live the almost uniquely peaceful and comfortable and entertained lives that we mostly do now live, still owe to them.

Travel books, or adventure books chronicling experiences of living abroad, can be highly variable in literary or other qualities. I have my favourites: I loved that PJ O’Rourke classic, "Holidays in Hell"; I enjoyed the travel and memoirs of the great Patrick Leigh-Fermor, and another favourite of mine was Eric Newby’s The Last Grain Race (describing his experience of sailing aboard a four-masted clipper-type ship). Being a bit of a yachtie, I also enjoyed the Robin Knox-Johnson account of his single-handed sailing trip around the world. And of course there are military memoirs where adventure and travel are co-mingled with armed expeditions. And a case in point is the writing of Norman Lewis.

I have not read much by Lewis, who died at the grand age of 95 after having spent a rich and varied career in places ranging from Brazil, Indonesia to Western Europe. And perhaps his most celebrated book is "Naples '44", describing his year in the southern Italian city in the immediate aftermath of the Allied landings in Italy. It is a superbly written account – Lewis has a wonderful eye for detail – and conveys the sheer bloody awfulness of life for ordinary Italians recovering from both the invasion and the Fascist regime that had been dislodged. For example, his descriptions of how little food the populace had, and what they had to eat, is sobering indeed to anyone reading moral-panic journalism about our supposed obesity crisis.

Of course, any account of southern Italy will include tales of the Mafia, and banditry, and the relentless amounts of corruption. What is particularly striking – and this is where the libertarian in me gets interested – is how the black market for stolen Allied goods, such as penicillin – thrived. Naturally, with so many goods suppressed or in short supply, criminal gangs and bent military personnel sought to make a market. This highlights how when markets are suppressed and where the fabric of civil society has been smashed by war, thugs can often fill the gap. In some cases, theft of supplies from the Allied forces got so bad that Lewis and his colleagues had to do something about it. Ordinary Italians who got caught pilfering supplies often received long jail sentences; well-connected businessmen (ie, Mafia guys), were acquitted when witnesses suddenly failed to show up.

Lewis became something of an expert on the Mafia and this region of Italy. He does not romanticise what he saw – he was too lacking in fake sentimentality for that. I have sometimes heard fellow free marketeers liken government to a sort of Mafia – tax is a kind of legalised thievery – but I am not sure it is an analogy I would push too far. I wonder how many of us would have wanted to live in Mafia-run Sicily or the neighbouring mainland, even with the tasty wine, olives and sunshine.

I intend to read a lot more of Lewis's output. His writing is wonderful.

“Oakeshott was an enchanting elfin figure, rather slight with a rather light but seductive voice. Men sometimes found him a little creepy, women never. He was married three times and was said to have various girlfriends scattered in boltholes in London and around the country. He was sceptical in his views, and not at all religious, thus conforming to my general theory that, as soon as British philosophers stopped believing in God, they started believing in sex. There is no more startling contrast between the celibacy, and indeed chastity, of Pascal and Locke and the insatiable appetites of Bertrand Russell and AJ Ayer and PH Nowell-Smith, the author of Ethics, who was said to have regarded it as a positive duty to sleep with other men’s wives.”

Ferdinand Mount, Cold Cream, page 273. Quirky, self-effacing and brilliant about its portrayal of Mount's life as a journalist and Downing Street policy wonk and conservative intellectual, this is one of the finest autobiographies I have read in years. Among the details that startled me was Mount's battle with a terrible asthma problem; I also loved his portrayal of his father and vignettes featuring the likes of Malcolm Muggeridge and Siegfried Sassoon.

I can also recommend Mount's recent book about how we are becoming rather like the ancient Romans.

I sometimes pick up quick-to-read paperbacks, either fiction or non-fiction, at airports to help pass the time during my flight. So, on a recent short break to Malta, I bought Dambisa Moyo’s How the West Was Lost, published a short while ago, which seeks to argue that for various reasons, good and bad, the West (essentially, Western Europe and North America) is in danger of losing out to the East. I was intrigued enough to pay a few quid for the book, but in the end I should have known better.

Moyo has a lot of things to say with which free marketeers might approve of: she denounces the way in which the banking system has encouraged over-use of debt financing, creating all manner of problems, culminating in the sub-prime mortgage disaster and associated asset price bubble; she also understands that modern Welfare States have created many problems. However, for all that she tries to accept that the rise of the former Third World nations from poverty is a Good Thing and to be applauded, I cannot help but feel that she does not really mean it very much. She's a mercantilist who sees economics as a titanic fight between states and is hostile, or at least sceptical, about the capacity of people operating in markets under the rule of law. And she repeats the canard that the panic of 2008 demonstrated the dangers of unfettered capitalism, oblivious to the fact that the monetary policies of the Fed, etc, were policies of state institutions, as was the interference in the US and other housing markets by governments (Freddie Mac, etc).

In fact, she seems wedded to a sort of neo-Malthusian argument that says that the desire for prosperity and higher living standards in places such as China is unmitigated bad news for the West as there are finite resources in energy, etc, and that Eastern prosperity comes at the expense of the West’s. In other words, she is arguing that economics is, in some ways, a case of winners and losers. Indeed, she talks repeatedly about the idea of there being a race, often using the very word... "race"... to make her points.

Here is one typical paragraph in which she says the West is suffering from all that terrible selfish individualism and we should benefit from a bit more of that no-nonsense collectivism as seen in China (page 172):

"Frankly speaking, the constitutional framework that has defined the US for the past three centuries is not likely to be amended in order to hand over more power to the state. Yet arguably more power, more flexibility and fewer committees are exactly what is needed. What sense does it make in the depths of the financial crisis – a state of economic emergency by most accounts, which brought the country and the world to its knees – for the President of the United States to have to build consensus around a desperately needed fiscal stimulus package before he and his advisors can act?"

She seems curiously unaware of to what extent the powers of the Federal government in the US have already gone way beyond what was envisaged by the Founders - and that's a bad thing - and that in other Western nations, such as the UK, the government of the day has considerable powers, or has yielded great powers to the European Union and its legions of unelected officials. And yet for Ms Moyo the problem is that is far too much of this pesky liberalism, checks and balances, and so forth. I hate to say it, but she's coming close to flirting with a form of fascism.

There are other, equally poor, arguments. For instance, she argues that the vast majority of citizens in Western nations have only reaped a small share of the benefits of greater trade and so on because many of the profits earned are paid to shareholders. For instance: (page 178) "The only thing companies were interested in was the company's profitability and therefore the shareholders' return on capital."

Wow, the owners of firms want to make a profit (as opposed to making a whacking great loss, presumably). But even this line ignores the fact that by "shareholder", we do not just mean a few isolated fat, capitalist bastards in suits; no, we also mean all the millions of people – including people a bit like Ms Moyo – who have savings plans, 401K plans, mutual funds, pension pots, etc. This line of hers also does rather beg the question of what should happen to these profits - should they be taxed in "reinvested" by governments? In several instances, she praises the behaviour of governments, such as oil-rich states, and their massive "sovereign wealth funds", arguing that these are used to benefit domestic populations. Well they may be in some cases, but even a cursory awareness of public choice economics should alert Ms Moyo to the dangers of corruption, mis-allocation of capital, political favouritism and faddism that often comes when government agencies disburse vast sums. The flashy public spending projects of the past have often brought dubious rewards.

And I just knew I had wasted my aircraft reading time when she scorned Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, arguing that unless all countries play “fair” (which never happens), then the argument for free trade that the LCA underpins is chucked away.

This argument – that free trade is only beneficial if everyone plays nice – has been demolished time and again. A good example comes from Deepak Lal, in his book, Reviving the Invisible Hand.

Here is a passage:

"a country will benefit from removing its own tariffs and import restrictions even if all its trading partners maintain theirs. For as long as the domestic prices of goods in our country under autarky differ from those at which they can be imported and exported under free trade, the country will be able to obtain the gains from trade both by obtaining imported goods at a lower cost than they are produced at home (the consumption gain) and by specialising in producing and exporting those goods in which it has a comparative advantage and importing the others (the production gain), irrespective of the tariff applied by their trading partners. For these trade restrictions only damage the protectionist country’s welfare, and it would be senseless not to improve one’s own welfare just because someone else is damaging theirs. There is no point throwing rocks into one’s harbour just because others are throwing rocks into theirs. Hence, there is an incontrovertible case for every country to unilaterally adopt free trade, irrespective of the protectionist policies of other countries – with one exception. Suppose that a country is the only producer of some good – say, oil."

He goes on to explain this case but says that in fact, retaliatory trade practices and other issues take the edge off this argument also.

It is all such a pity. She started well, but I really wish I had read that new Lee Child thriller instead.

Tim Worstall has a new book out, Chasing Rainbows, which sets out what he regards as the economic fallacies of much of the Green movement. Such fallacies, he argues, actually get in the way of solving or at least trying to handle the genuine problems that may exist.

What is good about Tim's book is that he is not some sort of cliched "denier"; he does not base his argument on the idea that AGW is some sort of evil collectivist con-trick or piece of doomsterish nonsense (although I am sure some commenters will want to raise that point). Rather, he says if there are problems caused by a buildup of CO2 in the atmosphere, and there are costs of such problems, then let's use the tools of economics. For instance, he talks about carbon taxes. I am not a fan of taxes, but I can see a certain logic. They are far better than carbon credits and carbon trading, in my view.

Like Nigel Lawson, I see the idea of a market in carbon credits not as a solution to AGW but as something with great potential for fraud. The question I have about carbon tax, however, is what happens to the revenues. If they are levied by nation states, then clearly there will be demands for such taxes to be "harmonised" and levied by some sort of single organisation. And then the question arises as to what happens to such revenues?

Much of the book bears many of the trademarks of Tim Worstall's own excellent blog: lots of data flecked with his caustic wit, often at the expense of such buffoons like George Monbiot and Jonathan Porritt, and on tax, the appalling Richard Murphy, who gets a solid going over at least once a day. There is a touch of PJ O'Rourke in how Tim likes to use a quip to make a serious point. I particularly like the way he gets hold of important concepts, such as the Law of Comparative Advantage, or the idea of opportunity costs, using examples of how forcing households to recycle waste imposes unpaid labour costs, which if added up, can be shown to represent a large cost. Being a good student of the great French classical liberal Frederick Bastiat, Tim understands the point about "what is seen and what is unseen" - understanding that the visible costs of environmental degradation need to be balanced against the unseen costs of trying to deal with it. Bastiat is one of those writers who ought, in a sane world, to be on the compulsory reading list of every school pupil.

The central message of this book is that there are problems, but there are also rational approaches to them, and that the Green movement, or at least its most collectivist parts, are blocking rational reforms. It is a similar point to that made by Matt Ridley in his book, the Rational Optimist, to which I have referred before. By their one-eyed focus on AGW alarmism, and by adopting a reactionary, command and control approach to the issue, they are blocking sensible alternatives, and also crowding out other issues, such as alleviation of poverty, which can be made worse by such foolish ventures as subsidies to biofuels, for example.

Chasing Rainbows makes for a good stocking filler this Christmas. Go on, do it for the children and for Tim's bank balance.

Sometimes it is the reactions of people that really give me ideas about what to write about. On Tuesday night, I went along to a book-signing and talk featuring the one and only PJ O' Rourke, who has a new book out, entitled, "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages The Bastards". He was thoroughly charming and nice, and, I am glad to say, looks in pretty good shape after having beaten a recent cancer scare. I hope he's around to tickle our funny bones for many years yet. Tuesday night's event was put on by the Adam Smith Institute. This was appropriate: O' Rourke has written about Adam Smith and to great effect.

He gave a variant of a talk which has been heard at several places this week. Here is a write-up of another event he was at by someone called Ian Dunt. And it is clear that Mr Dunt is not a great fan:

The first thing I noticed was the age of the audience. O'Rourke is 63, and the average age of the people listening to him was around that. Noam Chomsky is 82, but most of the people at his gigs are in their 20s, which gives some credibility to the old maxim about people drifting to the right as they age.

Or quite possibly, what happens is that when people in their 20s realise that Chomsky, with his moral equivalence idea that there is no real difference between totalitarian communism and liberal democracy, is talking pretentious nonsense, they wake up. Having a family, running a business, paying taxes and generally living tend to have a sobering, but also enlightening, effect. That is not the same as saying that people necessarily get more cynical or pessimistic as they get older. In my case (44 years old, a few greys but still dashing good looks), I am what might be called a "rational optimist", to borrow from the title of Matt Ridley's recent brilliant book. And O'Rourke, all 63 years of him, is pretty upbeat about what happens when free men and women, operating under some pretty elementary rules of the game, are left to get on with life. The real reactionaries and grumps, it seems to me, are those on the "left" - sorry it is a loose term but it will have to do - who so distrust ordinary people to run their lives that they consider it necessary for people to be directed, "nudged" or whatever, in the general direction of Progress. The real old farts are those who think it is somehow not an outrage that the state takes at least 50 per cent of all wealth.

Then we get to this passage:

O Rourke brought up Isaiah Berlin's distinction between positive and negative rights, which is all-too frequently ignored outside of academia. In typical fashion, and rather usefully I thought, he turned them into "gimme" rights and "get out of here rights".

Yes.

As he aged, the role of "gimme" rights, which, as a right-wing American, he termed "entitlements", diminished, while the role of "get out of here rights" evidently became more prominent. The argument, which is pretty topical given the debate over public spending, is that entitlements don't ultimately promote freedom and that political leaders have been cowardly in their reluctance to disassociate themselves from them. I've never found this a particularly convincing argument and there was little last night to bring me onside, despite its witty and eloquent presentation. Ultimately, "entitlements" like free health care for all maximise freedom because health is the prerequisite for all other freedoms. Similarly, universal free education allows people to assess choices. There is no real freedom under ignorance. There is also, I would have thought, a strict minimal benchmark of material possession, under which political freedoms become irrelevant. After all, what use is the right to privacy if you have to sleep on the streets? It's a crude example, but it highlights the difficulties conservatives have in completely disassociating economic and political rights.

This is a standard misconception; what the reviewer is claiming is that we need to have rights to things, such as education or healthcare, in order to also enjoy the kind of negative liberty that a classical liberal - as O'Rourke is - values. I am not so sure about that. The ability to act, to choose, or walk, lift your arms and so on is not the same as liberty. What we are talking about here is ability, capacity, or in other cases, wealth. A lot of people use the word liberty, and hence rights, very loosely. And in any respect, if we want more of healthcare, education and so on, it is far from obvious that saying that I have a "right" to something means that I do, or that I can coerce someone else to give me £X,000 to pay for whatever it is I deem I have a right to. Does this mean, for instance, that if Mr Dunt feels he has a "right" to an education for himself or his family, that the state should compel some people to teach him and his kids? Where does this presumption stem from? What happens if those told to teach Mr Dunt's kids tell him, ever so politely, to get lost?

Also, while it is undoubtedly true that being educated and healthy helps us to make choices, it is a fairly practical point that under liberal capitalism, with more wealth and so on, education and healthcare tend to proliferate. It is poverty that best describes the lack of such things, and capitalism, given the chance, tends to be very good in eradicating this. Of course Mr Dunt, if I sense his political views accurately, probably would then claim that a lot of poor people in rich countries don't enjoy this, to which I respond by saying that he should consider the role of non-state bodies (like Friendly Societies, etc) in delivering many of the things now presumed to only come from the state. And as a practical issue, O'Rourke could and did point out what a mess the State often makes of eradicating poverty, or even worse, in eradicating the habits that beget poverty. As an aside, a person who writes very clearly on the issue of conflating genuine rights from "gimme rights" is Tom G Palmer, in this recent book, Realising Freedom.

On we go:

So it was a little disappointing to hear O'Rourke end his argument with a defence of the free market, so dull and obvious that it did his considerable intellect a disservice. The free market merely communicates value, he argued, it was not an ideology or a creed. The reason for Communism's collapse was its inability to properly account for the value of things, which money does instantly. It's quite true, of course, but the only time it would crop up is when arguing against a Soviet economist. There are very few, if any, people today arguing for Soviet Communism. The current argument in the West is really about the appropriate balance of the mixed economy under a deficit, where merely promoting the benefits of the free market is something of a mute point. Given the combination of his intelligence and his position in a political culture where we usually hear only the raving lunatics, I was expecting something a little more rewarding. Something about this anti-Soviet argument reminded me of his age, and the age of the people around me.

The problem with this paragraph is that the case for the market is far from "dull and obvious". The mixed economy we have now, as Dunt acknowledges we do, has not exactly shown itself to be a coherent mixture, at all. If the benefits of the market were really "obvious", then how to explain why, in 2010, after a decade of what is sometimes called a period of "neo-liberalism (often as a term of abuse), we have a country with crippling public debts, a central banking system that operates more like Soviet central planning in how it sets the price of money, a vast Welfare State, high joblessness among much of the populace; a monopolistic healthcare system with problems of all kinds; rising regulatory burdens on business, and the rest? Something is clearly not "obvious" enough for people to realise there is a problem. Sometimes, banging on about the "obvious" is vitally necessary. And all the better if it comes with good jokes that make Guardianistas a bit uncomfortable.

And the line about the Soviet Union also jars. Reminding some people that we once were confronted by a vast, socialist empire, which, thanks to certain forces, collapsed, is a necessary thing. It may make a certain type of left-of-centre person uneasy to be reminded of the Soviet Union, in much the same way as it might make me uneasy to remember a youthful indiscretion. Leftists, when contemplating the terrible history of the SU, might want to say, "Oh, cannot we just move on and get over it?", but I think that lets people off too lightly.

There have, as I might expect, been a flurry of reviews about a recent biography of Harold Macmillan, who - to those non-Brit readers who might not have heard of him - was prime minister in the late 1950s through to 1963, and who was involved in controversies that hung over his head until his very old age, such as the issue of his alleged involvement in sending Cossack forces back to the tender mercies of Stalin at the end of WW2. He was a complex and interesting character in many ways; my mother remembers his nickname of "Supermac" and the extraordinary period in the early 1960s when the Profumo Scandal broke, as well as Macmillan's own resignation through ill health and the subsequent emergence of Alec Douglas Home as leader. Home, let it not be forgotten considering how he was mercilessly lampooned by parts of the leftist press, almost won the 1964 general election.

One review here by Simon Heffer more or less sums up my own views of the man. Heffer recognises that for all Macmillan's undoubted merits - he was, for example, an extremely brave army officer wounded several times in the First World War - that he was a decidedly flawed politician in certain respects, particularly on the crucial issue of economic policy and industrial relations. The 1950s and 60s saw the rise of what was to be dubbed the "British disease" - a time of rising industrial strife, inflation, low productivity, endless "stop-go" cycles of Keynesian-inspired reflation followed by subsequent slamming on of the monetary brakes. And while it would be grossly unfair to pin too much blame on one prime minister for the sort of problems that eventually came to a head in the 1970s, he must take some share of the responsibility for the mess that was eventually addressed - after a fashion - by Mrs Thatcher's administration in the 1980s. And yet the impression I get from Heffer's review, and particularly, this one by Peregrine Worsthorne, is that the biography more or less absolves Macmillan of any blame whatever. Worsthorne's review in the Spectator - behind a subscription firewall - carries this, for instance:

"He was right to have himself been the main political champion of his old friend Keynes and his economics."

Oh dear. Fell asleep during the 1970s, did we?

He also says that Macmillan was right to have played down the danger of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I am not sure that is really true, but if it was true, is that to his credit? With the benefit of hindsight, the Soviet Union was a rotten house that looked imposing with all its mass Red Square parades and all the rest but eventually crumbled very fast, but at the time, it did not seem that way, and some very supposedly clever people, such as that Keynes fan (!) JK Galbraith, were arguing as late as the early 80s that there was no real difference economically between the West and the Soviet Empire. And the sheer size of the Soviet armed forces, and the way that the Hungarian and Czech revolts were harshly suppressed, hardly squares with the idea that that Empire could be treated with a sort of shrug of the shoulders. By the way, for a dose of good sense on the Cold War years, I recommend this by Norman Stone.

But perhaps the most ludicrous aspect of Worsthorne's review is this part, in which he writes mournfully of what might had been had Sir Alec Douglas Home won in 1964:

"This would have spared us both the Thatcher interlude, which put power in to the greedy hands of what Macmillan called the 'banksters', and then the Blair/Brown years, which entrusted it to the equally grasping and disreputable New Labour cabal, which purported to be a meritocracy. But it is beginning to look as if a promising reaction has set in - not too late one hopes - and although David Cameron is not exactly a 14th earl, he is the next best thing, so Uncle Harold must be cheering in his grave."

I am going to do Worsthorne the respect of assuming he is sane, and serious, when he wrote that somehow, Mrs Thatcher's time in office was some sort of ghastly "interlude" when the rightful aristocratic rulers of us unwashed were horribly pushed aside by a bunch of grammar school educated City slickers and Jewish intellectuals. Macmillan once infamously said that he regretted there were more Estonians than Etonians in the Tory Cabinet of the time, a particularly nasty little line. Sure, the attack on the Blair and Brown bunch is perhaps more deserved, but let's not forget that Blair was a Fettes public schoolboy, and a good many of Mrs Thatcher's ministers came from smart backgrounds.

In fact, when all is said and done, what Worsthorne rates as Macmillan's greatest achievement, is contained in the opening paragraph of his review. I leave readers with this to ponder:

"Since the main purpose on earth of the Conservative Party was, and still should be, to keep Britain's ancient and well-proven social and political hierarchy in power - give or take a few necessary upward mobility adjustments - Harold Macmillan must rank very high in the scale of successful Conservative prime ministers; just below Benjamin Disraeli, whose skill in sugaring the pill of inequality and humanising the face of privilege is never likely to be bettered."

In other words, whatever Macmillan may or may not have done to stem the UK's post-war economic decline, at least he kept the toffs on top.

Words fail me.

From a WSJ review by Trevor Butterworth of Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy:

But the power of knowledge would not, by itself, have given Britain its formidable economic edge; the Continent, too, had an array of scientific genius as brilliant as any in Scotland and England. (Think only of the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier.) The reason for Britain's exceptionalism, Mr. Mokyr says, lies in the increasing hostility to rent-seeking - the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth - among the country's most important intellectuals in the second half of the 18th century. Indeed, a host of liberal ideas, in the classic sense, took hold: the rejection of mercantilism's closed markets, the weakening of guilds and the expansion of internal free trade, and robust physical and intellectual property rights all put Britain far ahead of France, where violent revolution was needed to disrupt the privileges of the old regime.

Such political upheaval in Europe, notes Mr. Mokyr, disrupted trade, fostered uncertainty, and may well have created all kinds of knock-on social disincentives for technological and scientific innovation and collaboration with business. Much as we might deplore too many of our brightest students going into law rather than chemistry or engineering, it is not unreasonable to think that many of France's brightest thinkers were diverted by brute events into political rather than scientific activism (or chastened by poor Lavoisier's beheading during the Revolution).

Thus Montesquieu may have advocated free trade as passionately as Adam Smith, but Smith's "Wealth of Nations" - the canonical text of the Industrial Enlightenment - fell upon a society primed to judge and implement it as an operating system. Evangelical and liberal alike shared in the vision of "frugal" government, as Mr. Mokyr puts it. In the opening decades of the 19th century, Parliament took an ax to itself, pruning the books of what were now seen as harmfully restrictive laws.

I have my doubts about whether robust intellectual property rights did much to encourage the industrial revolution, but apart from that ...

This books is now in the post to me, thanks to Amazon, that characteristic trading innovation of our own time.

I suppose reading books like this is, for a British libertarian, an experience somewhat like that of a religious believer contemplating the delights of the Garden of Eden. It may be a bit bogus, in the sense that like all earthly Edens this one was decidedly imperfect and probably felt just as discouraging to its contemporaries as life seems to a lot of us now, a lot of the time.

For who knows? Maybe the times we are living through now may be looked back upon by later generations as similarly Eden-like, either because we are now making huge intellectual (as well as more obvious economic - think Amazon) progress, but we can't quite see it (maybe any decade now our Parliaments will take axes to themselves), or because times are about to get a lot worse.

I hope (although I promise nothing) to report back here about whether the book deserves the above praise.

"As you march grimly forward through the detritus of economic debate, with a Sturmgewehr 90 assault rifle and fixed bayonet gripped firmly in your hand, thousands of blind Keynesian moles will leap up from deep dark holes in the mud to bite your ankles."

Andy Duncan. Like Andy, I have read Thomas E. Woods' Meltdown book and I wrote out some thoughts about it here. And here.

Glad to see Andy is writing away. Old Samizdata hands may remember he used to scribble for us occasionally.

Via National Review's The Corner blog, I see that FA Hayek's The Road To Serfdom is top of the Amazon charts. Wow.

Funny how these supposed golden oldies keep racking up the best-seller scores, isn't it?

Mind you, I guess the same phenomenon applies to entertainers. Like it or not, Sinatra and Elvis keep selling.

There is a bit of a stir going on concerning a recent, very rude and unpleasant review of Matt Ridley's recent book concerning how optimistic Man should be about the trend of events. George Monbiot, who wrote the review, is answered, at length, and with great restraint, by Matt Ridley.

Monbiot - known in these parts as George Moonbat - should be ashamed of writing such a piece. But then, as Bishop Hill notes, it is clear that Ridley has really got under Monbiot's skin.

Optimism, I find, often really annoys a certain mindset, not just on the left, but to a certain "things were better in my day before we got infested by all those foreigners" sort of conservative. A pox on both their houses.

You can get Ridley's book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves here.

Dr Butler's work is a follow up to his book "The Rotten State of Britain" - itself a fine book explaining many of the problems this country faces.

In "The Alternative Manifesto" Dr Butler concentrates on the terrible economic position that Britain finds itself in, what really caused this position and what should be done about it.

Unlike the United States there is little challenge in Britain to the establishment view that all our problems are caused by "greedy bankers" and "lack of regulations". The "lack of regulations" point is utterly absurd as there are endless national and indeed international regulations (for example the "mark to market" rule was part of the international financial regulations agreed, years ago, in Basel, Switzerland).

And, as for "greedy bankers", they are indeed greedy, but to blame their greed for the crises is like blaming the speculators of "charge alley" for the problems of Britain in the 18th century - many great figures of English literature did this (as to attack the wicked speculators diverted attention from the politicians who were paying many of the great figures in English literature), but that does not alter the fact that it was the "public credit" itself, the endless government borrowing, that was at the root of the economic problems and the political corruption - not the speculators in the debt, however wicked they may have been.

Even today with our fiat money and fractional reserve banking taking beyond any level of sanity - even the most crazy banker can only build a pyramid of debt on new money that the governments themselves have created, and indeed it is these governments who are normally the loudest voices demanding that banks "expand credit" - lend more money.

However, presently Dr Butler's works are the only books dissenting from the establishment view (the view that the root of the problem is the greed of bankers and the solution is yet more taxes and regulations) that one can find in (for example) high street book stores.

This may be difficult for an American reader to understand, so I will explain a bit further. In a British book shop or supermarket book section you may find works by people who are regarded (and indeed regard themselves) as foes of the "liberal" left establishment - but they will not cover the basic economic crises that faces us. Britain has its Richard Littlejohn and J. Clarkson, but they are not really like America's Glenn Beck.

Mr Littlejohn will attack "politically correct" (i.e. "identity politics" stuff whose origins lie in the Marxist Frankfurt school) regulations and thought police attitudes, and Mr Clarkson may broadcast a similar point of view on the BBC itself (which he is allowed to do because he also broadcasts nasty and dishonest attacks on the United States - American soldiers were cowards facing the Communists in Vietnam, the United States looted Britain during World War II, America was not on Britain's side during the Falklands war..... and on and on), but neither man will explain the rise in the money supply or how this credit money bubble led to the economic crash, and how government bailouts will make things worse..... (although, of course, bailouts only make things worse over a period of years - in the short term bailouts put off a great slump, the liquidation of the vast black hole of debt Malinvestments, and may even produce a phony boomlet, and the short term is all that politicians tend to care about).

On the great crises of our age the "everyman" part of the British "right" (for want of a better term) has nothing to say. Nor is there (yet) any message from dissenting free market scholars - nothing like Thomas Woods' (Austrian School) "Meltdown" or Thomas Sowell's (more Chicago School) "The Housing Boom and Bust" - explaining how the government (and it did this in Britain as much as the United States) created a vast credit money bubble via the Central Bank and how regulations and government policy pushed this money into the real estate market in the United States (which was then passed on, in the form of securities, to Britain and many other nations).

Partly this may be because there are simply fewer pro free market scholars in Britain - but it also may be due to certain features of the British publishing and book selling trade. And, of course, the utter lack of any even vaguely pro freedom television or radio stations in this country - for those American conservatives and libertarians who complain about the various imperfections of Fox News my reply would be "you would soon miss it if you lived in a country without one".

All these obstacles Dr Butler has managed to overcome - his works are available. Not just on the internet, but also in the ordinary shops and that is still important. One can find his "The Alternative Manifesto" not only in good London book shops such as Foyles, but also in the standard (and normally quite horrible) "Waterstones" that exists in the average British town although not yet in the (even worse) "W.H. Smith" book shops. It is up to us to buy Dr Butler's work in order to show that the British people are not just interested in Barack Obama's "Dreams from my Father" (I wonder how many people who have bought this work have actually read it - for example the anti British rant on the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, in reality a revolt that was based on a weird mixture of disgusting tribal practices and Marxism) and other "celebrity" works.

Are we really just concerned with Barack Obama's flat tummy (eat less, smoke more would seem to be the message if we are) and various female celebs’ plastic breasts? Do we not care at all about what problems we face - what caused them, and how to dig ourselves out of this mess?

Dr Butler does a good job explaining not only the absurd monetary policies that have brought us down, but also the fiscal policies (the wild taxation, and far wilder government spending) that would have undermined our economic prospects even if monetary policy had been sane.

We simply can not go on wildly try to reinflate the credit bubble - and trying to use government spending to try and buy prosperity (presumably under the delusion that some Galactic Federation exists that will bail us all out when the whole farce finally collapses) - and we can not go on ignoring the ever growing economic and social harm done by an out of control and "unsustainable" Welfare State (what the Economist and Financial Times would call "public goods" - on which the "essential spending" just happens to have to go up by a vast amount every year for ever, and which in no way shape or form ever lead to a broken country).

However, there are less favourable things that need to be said about Dr Butler's latest book:

Firstly he has a tendency to go off at tangents - so do I (so I have sympathy with this), but some of the tangents are unfortunate. For example the causal light-hearted mention of human trafficking - it is not that Dr Butler really things that women being raped, brutalized, threatened with death, forcibly addicted to drugs and then basically used as human toilets for the most debased and vicious lusts of men, is a just a bit of fun. On the contrary, Dr Butler thinks such things are terrible - but they do not happen very often and the government is wildly overestimating how common they are in order to have an excuse for yet more power.

However, the left establishment are not very fair in their reviews (ask Glenn Beck or indeed any author or broadcaster outside the left) so Dr Butler should expect to get attacked for what he says (or rather what the left will pretend he says) about human trafficking. This part of the book needed either far more of a passionate attack on the terrible things that are done to some women - or just the use of the blue pencil on the whole section.

On the bad effects of government regulations on general life Dr Butler gives many good examples. The sort of thing that will be familiar to those who have read the writings of Christopher Booker (mostly in the Sunday Telegraph newspaper) and his friend Dr Richard North. And Dr Butler tries to get at the philosophy behind the various demented "health and safety" (and so on) regulations - although perhaps not as well as F.A. Hayek did (in his works on the decline of the traditional view of the role of law - see his "Constitution of Liberty" and "Law, Legislation and Liberty" which themselves party draw on the works of British writers such as A.V. Dicey and, rather more, Chief Justice Hewart's "The New Despotism" 1929).

For an examination of the ideas that have made things worse in recent years the writings of Peter Hitchens are perhaps better than those of Dr Butler - but the articles and books of Peter Hitchens can seem "paranoid" to those who cling to the false hope that the political class has not been corrupted by collectivist ideas taught to them as students (indeed sometimes even as school children).

However, Dr Butler offers no real solutions to the problem of endless government regulations. He does not even suggest (as Booker, North, Hitchens and so many others do) that Britain leave the European Union, which would at least get rid of the tide of EU inspired regulations.

In fact Dr Butler simply seems to suggest that politicians, administrators and other members of the political class just become better people - "go thou and sin no more" may be fine theology, but it is not a political "manifesto", particularly as the ideas of the political class have been taught teach them that they are not "sinning" at all. Indeed that it is their role to "nudge" (or shove, or.....) people to obey them in every aspect of life.

More broadly Dr Butler is far better on the causes of the present crises than he is on the solutions to it:

This is not to say that Dr Butler does not argue for policies. On the contrary, he produces excellent and well argued policies on such things as the flat tax (rather than the endlessly complex "progressive" income tax), the need to reduce taxation on investment (if Warren Buffet's advice on the taxing of capital gains were followed there would not only be no more Warren Buffets it would also mean the destruction of what is left of investment in the Western world), and the need for real choice (not de facto state monopoly) in education and healthcare with the money being under the direct control of the individual not other people buying services in their name.

But, as Dr Butler would be the first to admit, most of these policies can be found in Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" (1980) or even in his "Capitalism and Freedom" (1962) - there is little specifically on the current crises, and little sign of understanding about how new evidence has complicated matters. For example, evidence (from the work of Charles Murray and others) that handing people money to spend on health and education (or food or whatever) is a wildly different thing from them earning money themselves and then choosing to spend it on these goods and services.

Even the flat tax proposal feels dated - as it ignores the work done on the perverse effects of one aspect of the "flat tax" proposal as it is normally presented. Namely the idea that people below a certain (reasonably high actually - although, to be fair, the figure that Dr Butler gives is a lot lower than some I have seen) level of income should not pay the tax at all (I know that government subsidizes many rich people to a disgusting level - I will deal with that further on).

This "let us get people out of the tax net" doctrine may be nice for people like me (I do not earn much - I never have and I never will). But for half of the American population to pay almost nothing of the main source of revenue for the Federal government (the income tax) is surely perverse in an age of one person one vote (it reminds me of Rome during the late Republic - where the mob paid no real taxes but got to vote for endless "bread and games"), and most flat tax proposals would take even more people out of the tax net.

It is surely no accident that most low government spending States in the United States either have no broad based income tax (Alaska, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Dakota, Tennessee and Texas - Washington State also has no State income tax but is not a low government spending State) or have a income tax that hits most voters (not just the rich and the middle class) - Alabama being the classic example of this.

The old way of financing American Federal government spending (in the days when it was about 3% of the economy, rather than about 30% of the economy) was via a tax on imports, which whilst terrible was better than taxing some people very highly and not (apart from with the Social Security tax of course) taxing the other half of the voters. It is a terrible mistake for America and Britain to build a "welfare underclass" as they have both done and (by phony "tax credits" and so on) are continuing to do.

A tax structure where everyone can vote - but only just about half of the voters pay much, will not work. Either at local or national level. Certainly the "rich should pay more than the poor" - but that should be in money, not as a proportion of their income. If it is as a proportion of their income also (due to "basic income" not being taxed at all) - then the point of the "flat tax" is lost, as lots of people will be able to vote for government spending that they do not think they will be paying for.

Of course they will indirectly pay for this spending (pay for it by general economic decline), but that is an effect that the disinformation machine of the left (of academia, the "mainstream" media and so on) will strongly dispute - it will lead to a California type situation where (contrary to the Economist magazine) the problem is not referendums keeping taxes down, but wildly high government spending (fully supported by the politicians in the State legislature and the academic, judicial and media parts of the establishment) with many voters (especially the recent arrivals from Latin America) told that only "the rich" need pay most of the tax burden - an impossible burden of government spending for any tax system to support in any case.

This is not to say that the policies that Dr Butler suggests would not be an improvement on we have now, but one must be careful to no longer hope for vast improvement from these policies in the provision of "public services" - and of course it does not really deal with the central problem of our time we can not afford this vast burden of government spending any more. Although at least Dr Butler knows this - whereas the establishment call every good or service a "right" that must be provided at the expense of the taxpayer. In the latest absurdity both the British and American academic, media and political establishments have declared that "broadband internet access" is such a "right". No doubt the old promise of V.I. "Lenin" of gold plated public toilets will be introduced next week.

On how one should at first respond to the crises Dr Butler does not really dissent from the establishment - he supports both bailing out the banks and then increasing the money supply to try and restore demand.

Have no fear I am not about to launch into a massive Austrian School attack on Chicago School Monetarism. I am just going to make a political point.

One can not (with hope of success) support bailing out the banks (let alone subsidies for favoured corporations - which is what increasing the money supply really means) and then turn round and say "now we have got to get Welfare State Entitlement spending under control".

As Bastiat noted a century and a half ago - one can not, politically, support subsidizing the rich and oppose subsidizing the poor. It will not work - so even if I accepted the economics of "bailoutism" (which, of course, I do not - no matter how terrible the liquidation of the vast black hole of debt malinvestments would be, putting it off does not make it less terrible, in fact it will make it even more terrible) the politics of it are absurd and self defeating. In the end there is a moral side to politics, one must have a code of honour (the Cameron crowd are laughing at this point - but you will find out that your "cleverness" can not help you in the long term). For if one has no honour one will be exposed as dishonourable - and one loses all moral credibility to do the hard things that must be done.

Or to put it in blunt language - one can not take the free bread out of the mouths of the poor (as the Welfare State, the "essential public goods", has reached such a level of spending that will not be “sustainable" over the next few years - especially when the bubble economy finally does collapse) whilst one slips money into the pockets of one's rich friends.

Perhaps Dr Butler feels some of this himself - for his "Alternative Manifesto" is rather light on specific ways to save money.

No doubt Dr Butler would support such things as abolishing "Regional Government" (indeed I strongly suspect that he is one of the people in the "think tank world" who has been arguing strongly for getting rid of "regional development agencies" "development companies" and other QUANGOs ) and hopefully Dr Butler would strongly support Britain leaving the European Union (although I can not find the place in this book where this is specifically argued for - which is odd as leaving the E.U. is also an essential precondition for any serious roll back of regulations). But such moves will hardly be enough.

And, whatever may have been the case in Canada, I can not really put much faith the chances of a new "Public Service Ministry" (a "Ministry of Administrative Affairs"? led by Jim Hacker?) to achieve anything. If I were to draw a lesson from Canada that might be applied to Britain, it would be that of former Premier Harris of Ontario - honestly argue for the real reductions in government spending (and do not pretend that this will lead to "better public services" or other such B.S.) and voters may rally to your cause.

Even some people who were openly told they were going to have their benefits cut or even abolished voted for Harris - they voted for him because they saw an honest man who was going to what was needed to save society (i.e. that network of civil interactions that make up a real society - for there is no such "thing" or entity called "society" that has resources to do things of its own, only real individuals and their work).

I am poor and I can tell anyone prepared to listen that many poor people are not rats or insects - we are men, and are prepared to respond as men if we are talked with honestly by people who do not hide the fact that we are to suffer. Rather than presented with pathetic attempts to deceive us by shifty Captain Hook style Old Etonians (there are good Etonians and bad - sadly the bad, the dishonest and dishonourable, are in the key positions presently).

In recent times public attention has been, quite rightly, drawn to the obscene costs of the bank (and other such) bailouts. Indeed this cost is even higher than is generally believed as the published numbers (for bailouts) do not contain the hidden subsidies. For example the old trick of sweetheart (low interest rate) loans for connected banks and other corporations - via the Bank of England (the "discount window" and other scams), or the 200 billion Pounds in "quantitative easing" new money.

In both Britain and the United States the practice is for government (via the central bank) to produce money, then "lend" it out (at near zero interest rates) to politically connected banks and other corporations, who then (in turn) lend it back to the government (via the Treasury) at a higher rate of interest.

This is such a disgusting (and dishonest) subsidy of the rich that it is difficult for me to find (non "Anglo Saxon") words to describe it. And, of course, it means that the profits of banks and stock markets recently announced are one big fraud. Of course there are people who say that governments should just print "debt free money" and spend it - however such an open fraud could not last (the reason that Lord Keynes supported using the banking system to hide the monetary expansion fraud is because it can be made so complex that the public does not know what is going on).

Dr Butler main complaint about "quantitative easing" is that it was not larger - that it did not contain money for companies to play with (engage in malinvestments with) rather than just lend to the government to fund yet more wild government spending. This was the one point in reading Dr Butler's work when the book left my hand and made contact with the far wall. I am no enemy of the rich (I hope what I have already written proves that), but to subsidize them on an even greater scale is utterly unacceptable (on economic, political and yes moral grounds) - indeed to carry on subsidizing them at present levels is also utterly unacceptable.

"But it is not just the rich who will be hurt by allowing the credit bubble economy to collapse Mr Marks".

Quite so - and I personally may very well not survive such a collapse (if things do turn out badly for me I hope that I can at least find the courage to face my end with some scrap of dignity - but I may fail even in this). However, such a collapse will happen and every time the collapse is put off (by yet another bailout orgy of money supply expansion and government spending) the eventual collapse is made worse (and poor people like me are put into a position from which we are even less likely to survive). It is "later than you think" and the end of this credit bubble economy can not be long delayed - no matter how much effort is put into trying to create one last "crack up boom".

That is the seriousness of the situation we face, a situation where people must come together in voluntary effort (civil interaction - the true meaning of "the market", both "for profit" and in terms of mutual aid) in order to save what can be saved and to build new things after the tidal wave of liquidation has passed by. Any government interventionism (especially in the labour market) will just make mass unemployment (and the terrible poverty that will go with it) worse and last longer. It will prevent people helping themselves, and helping each other, in the terrible times we will soon face.

For all its other merits, I do not believe that Dr Butler's work fully grasps the seriousness of the situation we will face in the coming years.

It is an interesting argument made here that so-called "instant books", written in the aftermath of some crisis or big event, can be easily overturned by subsequent events, debate and analysis. Quite true. And it is also true that the internet, blogging and online debate is intensifying this process of making a book look dated within months of publication. But it seems to me that in the article I link to, the author of the item is making some mistakes about the book, Meltdown, written by Thomas Woods about a year ago.

For a start, I think that it is worthwhile that some authors, as soon as the hue and cry went up about "greedy bankers", sought to challenge the establishment "narrative", assiduously supported by parts of the mainstream media, that says that the meltdown in financial markets somehow proves that capitalism is flawed, needs more regulations, controls, etc. Getting a book out as quickly as possible makes sense because a book is a talking point. Even if some of its facts are challenged or overturned, the point is that the author gets invited to give talks, has to take questions, can be asked for more details, etc. A book, in other words, is a good starting point. No book, no launch party, no nothing.

And challenging the established narrative any way possible is important. The usual line is what I hear from David Cameron, Barack Obama, and of course our own government. To hear the contrary view, that what happened was primarily caused by state-established central banks distorting price signals of interest rates, and hence fuelling an asset bubble, is much rarer. For example, the other day I walked into Waterstones, and in the section on economics and current affairs were books such as Gillian Tett's Fool's Gold, or books with such racy titles as How I Caused The Credit Crunch. In these cases, the books will typically treat the issue as one where the crisis is caused by "greedy", or naive bankers, who are treated as little different from wild animals, or caused by the supposed dangerous complexity of trading technologies.

The author of the article criticising Mr Woods' book, Roger Donway, argues that Mr Woods' book is flawed in many ways, as it, for example, does not give much of an idea of what caused the crisis beyond the standard "Austrian" analysis of what happens when central banks flood the world with fiat money. But why should Mr Woods write a 1,000-word tome to spell out the causes of the crisis in every last detail? The purpose of the book, as is pretty clear to someone like me who knows a thing or two about economics, is to spell out to the general reader what the broad, free market take on the crisis is. I happen to think that Mr Woods summary of the "Austrian" view on what money, banking, the business cycle, etc, are, is simply brilliant. There can never be enough books spelling out why, for example, it is necessary to understand the role of money, and what money is and more, what it is not.

Mr Donway just assumes that folk who might pick up Mr Woods' book off the shelves are already well-versed in their von Mises, Hayek or Rothbard. But that is hardly likely. The sort of person who steps into a bookstore, and wants to read something about the current financial mayhem, and who might be the sort of person who doubts the current wisdom but who is not an economics specialist, is ideally suited to read this sort of book. Yet Mr Donway writes:

"Chapter 5 also presents material familiar to anyone who has perused some works of Austrian economists, particularly the works of Murray Rothbard. And this material is even less informative about the meltdown of 2008. Entitled “Great Myths about the Great Depression,” the chapter actually takes very brief looks at the depressions of the nineteenth century and the depression of 1920–21, as well as devoting 11 pages to the causes of the Great Depression. And how does an examination of the Great Depression help explain the collapse of 2008? “In both cases, an inflationary credit boom brought about by the Fed’s lowering of interest rates led to massive resource misallocation and a distorted capital structure.” (106) That’s not very helpful."

The events of previous depressions/recessions will always be different in certain ways from what is happening now, but that is nitpicking. The point of why Mr Woods talks about the short-lived recession of 1920-21 (solved quickly without a Keynesian orgy of money-printing) and the decade-long stagnation in Japan in the 1990s, say, is to shed light on what ought to have been the approach of policymakers in the recent past. To say that an examination of the Great Depression gives no insight into what is happening now strikes me as a case of trying to shout debate down. After all, one can be sure that the advocates of Big Government and Keynesian demand management will call history in aid if they think it bolsters their case.

This paragraph is perhaps a bit fairer:

"Now, some critics might blame this tendency to abstractionism on Woods’s “ideological” economics, but I do not. If he believes in the pure Austrian theory of boom-and-bust, fine. Let him present his analysis using that theory and let his explanation be judged by its adequacy, not by its origins. But in order to judge the adequacy of Woods’s case, we need to hear him make it against those economists who understand his theoretical approach but disagree with it or at least disagree with his application of it. It is no help to hear Woods rebut mainstream economists who do not take Austrian economics seriously."

Quite possibly true. I know for a fact that people operating in the free market school of thought differ about quite a lot of things, such as whether fractional reserve banking should be illegal, whether state central banks are an evil to be abolished or institutions to be placed under better, tighter rules, etc. But Woods cannot be expected to go into vast reams of text to debate every real or potential objection from such quarters; and in any event, he does, I think, point out the differences that exist between say, the Chicago school - in some ways closer to the Keynesian one - and his "Austrian" point of view.

Of course, there is a need - and this is where I think Woods' book falls short as a piece of work - in showing exactly what practical steps governments could take in putting financial systems on a sounder footing. There is, in the UK for example, a move by economists such as Kevin Dowd and the folks over at the Cobden Centre to flesh out in detail as to what an "honest money" banking and financial system would actually look like. And as I have previously mentioned on this site, Professor Dowd has sketched out how, for example, a failed bank could be restructured and bankrupt banks be let go without crippling an economy.

And Professor Dowd has, or is about, to release a book on these matters. But for all that the Woods book may be a bit lacking in some respects, I do believe he did me a favour in helping to marshall some of my own thoughts about how to think about the credit crunch. I am glad he did that, and most impressed that he did so in such a short space of time, by focusing on the core ideas at stake.

I have started reading the book, Crashproof 2.0 by Peter Schiff, and I thought I would register some early impressions.

He is a guy who was once mocked for daring to suggest, only a few years ago, that the buildup of debt in the US and parts of the West, and its reliance on what amounts to "vendor financing" from Asia, was bound to end in tears. It did. "Vendor financing", by the way, relates to the practice of a firm that offers temporary loans to the consumers of its own products. This, more or less, says Mr Schiff, is what happened in the past decade or so: Western consumers bought cheap products from China; Western manufacturers went bust or offshored production to Asia; China used the foreign earnings from its exports to buy up Western debt, enabling even more Western consumer spending, fuelling even more Chinese exports......until the whole process when up in smoke. (This process was aided by an artificially weak Chinese exchange rate, not to mention the recklessly loose monetary policy of the Fed.) So far, so good: Schiff makes a lot of sense in debunking all of this.

But then there is a rather rum argument. Schiff says that somehow, this process was bad because as a result of the low-cost production from China and other parts of the world, US manufacturing jobs were replaced by allegedly lower-paying, crappier service sector jobs. (It is simply assumed that non-manufacturing jobs are worse than manufacturing ones). This sounds a bit like the sort of attack on globalisation I have heard made by such economic illiterates such as Lou Dobbs of CNN. I was a bit surprised that an Austrian-leaning writer such as Schiff should be making it. If the service sector can generate wealth for those who work in it, what is the problem? If, in a proper free market without the distortions of fiat money etc, certain manufacturing jobs were to be done by low-cost nations and other jobs by us, how is this a cause for Apocalyptic treatises?

Another query I have is this: if the Chinese/whoever are earning real income by selling us stuff, and then use that real income to lend us money that is used to fund investment in things that will create wealth in the future, again, how is this a problem? Sure, if that Chinese money is simply fuelling consumer spending and encouraging feckless spending and low savings - which is what did actually happen, I can see the issue. But lending money for productive purposes is hardly an evil. In the 19th Century, for example, the UK, with its wealth generated in the Industrial Revolution, was a net investor into countries such as the US, Canada and Argentina. I guess the trick is to make sure that the money lent for productive purposes is money derived from genuine savings, not funny money.
Maybe Mr Schiff will answer these points later in the book.

Following on from Michael Jennings' item about how science research is actually conducted, I was reminded of a post I did several years ago about a fine Gregory Benford book that drew very much on the issue of political game-playing and science research. Timescape is a fine novel, and will resonate with those bemused by the antics of AGW alarmists and their media cheerleaders.

The name of Hunter Lewis' book says it all: Where Keynes went wrong - and why world governments keep creating inflation, bubbles and busts.

What Mr Lewis has done is to update Henry Hazlitt's "The Failure of the New Economics" - the classic line by line refutation of Lord Keynes that the older ones among us read as undergraduates (before such works were purged from university libraries). Of course Hunter Lewis uses work on Keynes that was not available to Hazlitt in the 1950's and he explains the terrible effects that the influence of Keynesian ideas on the policies of modern governments (especially in the United States), but basically Hunter Lewis is a Hazlitt for our time.

To say this is not to diminish the achievement of Mr Lewis - which is a considerable one. Many people when the first come upon Keynesian doctrines at school and then at university spot some of the absurdities (such as the idea that the government spending more money makes a nation more wealthy), and when not satisfied by textbooks and by the explanations of teachers and lecturers, we go on to seek out J.M. Keynes' "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936) but then we are confronted with a tested mess. Not just a very badly written book (so different from the witty paragraphs that are quoted in the textbooks), but such a complex mass of absurdities and contradictions that one despairs (or let me be honest "one despairs" means "I despaired") of writing a full refutation of the work that was actually readable.

For example, the use of mathematics. It was obvious even to someone as ignorant of mathematics as me that Keynes used mathematics improperly - he used mathematical means that assumed, in their very structure, the very things the mathematics were supposed to "prove". Yet Keynes also downplayed the importance of mathematics in the "General Theory..." and in other works - so what was the point of trying to explain his misuse of mathematics? Hunter Lewis deals with this problem (as he deals with all the other problems that trying to seriously examine Keynes presents), by using enough words to fully explain what Keynes is doing - whilst not falling into the trap of making the language so complex that his book becomes unreadable. The great strength of Keynes' "General Theory..." is that it is almost unreadable - the nature of the writing is not an accident (Keynes could write perfectly clearly if he wanted to), it is deliberate - in order to obscure the line of "argument" and intimidate the reader into thinking "I can not follow this - Keynes must be a genius". Paul Samuelson (the main American spreader of the ideas to undergraduates in the post World War II world) admits all of the above, but then (without irony) takes it as proof of the 'genius' of Keynes - as Hunter Lewis explains in chapter 20 of his work, especially on pages 267 to 268.

Hunter Lewis takes the opposite approach, he writes very clearly indeed. And when he comes upon something in Keynes (as one does so often) that goes off at a tangent or raises a different subject he does not follow him in the main text of "Where Keynes Went Wrong" he carefully takes the matter and makes it an endnote of the book. This means that an person can read Mr Lewis' book at one sitting and see the full argument -and then (if someone wishes to do so) one can follow the various tangents and side issues.

Mr Lewis manages to do what I thought impossible - he takes the work of Keynes and divides it into logical themes and sections. He also fits the "General Theory..." into the background of the other works of Keynes and into the philosophical and social thought of Keynes. Neither over-stressing links (as, for example, Hayek once did by saying that Keynes lack of concern with the long term was explained by his homosexuality - i.e. because he was not going to have children he did not care about future generations), nor pretending that the personality and general philosophical beliefs of Keynes had no influence on his economics. After all Keynes himself accepted that they did - for him economics was not a value free science (for all his use of the authority of "science" to try and make people accept his suggestions) economics was a "side of ethics" (page 45 of this work).

For the sake of critics, Hunter Lewis calls calls chapter four of the book "a digression" but in truth the "immoralism" of Keynes is clearly directly relevant to his work in economics. The lack of a sense of honour in Keynes (his Cambridge Apostles Club and general Bloomsbury group view that the ends justify the means that an enlightened elite may use any means in order to rule the ignorant masses). Keynes does not produce illogical arguments (or rather arguments that look logical, but when one examines them with care one finds to be based on on violations of logical reasoning) out of ignorance - he does so because deception does not matter to him, indeed to deceive people by violating the laws of reasoning, or by just confusing them with a mist of words in debate is a good thing, if it leads to good ends - as Keynes defines good ends. In this I (although not Mr Lewis) might be tempted to add that Keynes is a true academic - in the sense of being in the tradition of Plato the prince of the "noble lie".

However, Hunter Lewis does not make the mistake of thinking that all was well with the theory and practice of money and banking before J.M. Keynes came along. On the contrary, several times (in different sections - as the matter becomes relevant) Mr Lewis shows us that things were very bad indeed. Not just were there terrible booms and busts (the worst of all being the credit money boom of Benjamin Strong in the late 1920's - see pages 323-325 of this work), but the basic understanding of such things by the establishment was fundamentally mistaken.

The people with influence did not warn against either government expansion of the money supply or the fundamental idea that bankers (nor anyone else) can not really lend out money that has not been first really saved (real savings being income that people choose not to consume - but make available to be lent to others) and that the same money can not be in the hands of different people in different places at the same time (a violation of basic logic). Indeed most people with influence did not even hold that banks that got into trouble should be faced with the same consequences as other business enterprises that got into trouble.

The warnings of men like Thomas Hankey in the 19th century were ignored and the policy advice of his foe Walter Bagehot (the second editor of the "Economist" magazine) was followed by, for example, the people who set up the Federal Reserve system in 1913. What Keynes did was to take the errors of men like Walter Bagehot and vastly inflate them (whilst removing the rational side of the writings of men like Bagehot) - mixing them with the worst elements of the various monetary cranks (i.e. the people who thought wealth could be increased by increasing "demand", spending, rather than by the hard road of work and saving). Keynes would not have had the success he did if he had not poisoned ground on which to plant his corrupt seed. Indeed he was careful to not be a revolutionary in how he suggested policy be put into effect.

Keynes may have told jokes from time to time about putting money in bottles, putting the money in old coal mines and allowing it to be dug up. But for the most part Keynes kept to the established policy of expanding the money supply by the route of working with the banks and other financial enterprises - governments would not just print money and spent it, there would be complex (and, for some people, profitable) game played. Keynes may have sometimes written as a radical (sometimes to the harm of his reputation - as with his friendly words about the new German system of government in the introduction to the German edition of the General Theory...), but at heart he was an establishment man. Even in economics Keynes did not try to really produce a revolutionary "New Economics" - he worked with the errors that already existed in theory, vastly expanding them and trying (as much as was practical) to distort or get rid of elements in economics that were true. Even the language of economics remained much the same - even if the meanings were altered. As the late W.H. Hutt was fond of pointing out (and Hunter Lewis knows well) Keynesians were not interested in open battle (for all Keynes love of debating - with people he knew would be respectful of course, he was not fond of debating with people who treated him with the contempt he treated them) Keynesians worked as their master had worked. They gained control of the leading journals, and they took control of academic appointment and the setting of examinations - they were masters of academic politics, just as they are masters of political manipulations in London and Washington D.C.

We will not be seeing a review of "Where Keynes Went Wrong" in the "Economist" magazine or in the "learned journals" - because that is not how Keynesians work, they work by marginalizing their critics (either trying to shout them down - or just ignoring them) not be trying to refute their arguments. At best the Keynesian will sneer at their foes - such as when "Nobel Price" winning Paul Krugman sneered at the Austrian theory of the boom-bust cycle as a "moral theory", to a Keynesian of course (when they are being honest) the use of the word "moral" is meant as an insult - just as using the term "common sense" is an insult. To say people should not try and lend out money that they do not really have sounds "moral" (it sounds like "do not spend money you have not got") and, therefore, the Keynesian is vile and common - no matter how "value free" the point may be as part of economics. Just as to say something is "common sense" (i.e. is accordance with the basic laws of reasoning) is an insult to the Keynesian - as to them if something goes along with traditional reasoning it must (again) be vile, something from the common herd. More government spending makes a nation richer, if you have a problem with deficits and debt - make them bigger, saving is not a virtue in fact it can undermine an economy, financial investment is not a matter of long term judgement - it is just casino betting, interest payments are just payments to rich parasites - ideally interest rates would be zero, "profit" is a dirty word and one should try and avoid using it in economics, taxing the rich is just a way of improving "social justice" it has no negative economic consequences one should be concerned about, and on and on. All this (and more) is what "Keynesian economics" is actually based on, when one strips away the (rigged) equations, and the mist of obscuring words.

I looked hard for errors in Hunter Lewis' work, but I was not successful. The closest I came was his failure to fully go into the arguments against fractional reserve banking as much as he should. If one is going to take this, very controversial position (which Mr Lewis does on pages 196-8) then one has to defend it more fully or at least refer to works that do. Mr Lewis does cite Murry Rothbard and he refers to George Reisman's "Capitalism". But this is not enough - if one is going to go into the deep and dangerous waters one must at least also cite Huerto de Soto's "Money, Bank Credit and Economic Cycles" for the full historical, legal and economic context.

However, overall I must recommend "Where Keynes Went Wrong" by Hunter Lewis. It is an important work, a major achievement and a vital book of warning for our times.

I recently read David Friedman's latest book, A Future Imperfect, and thoroughly enjoyed it. He has now posted a series of lectures he has given at different venues, touching on many of the subjects in the book, as well some that were not in the book. Subjects, for example, such as encryption, copyright, how technology is changing legal systems, society, our view of family life, and the like. Definitely worth downloading some of these lectures if you have the time. Ideal for playing on the MP3 player on the way to the office. A definite improvement on listening to the BBC's Today programme, that is for sure.

In the meantime, here is a quote from the book that I particularly liked. It is about nanotechnology and some of the fears people have, including the "grey goo" issue:

"Before you conclude that the end of the world is upon us, you consider the other side of the technology. With enough cell repair machines on duty, designer players may not be a problem. Human beings want to live and will pay for the privilege. The resources that will go into designing protections against threats, nanotechnological or otherwise, will be enomously greater than the (private) resources that will go into creating such threats - as they are at present, with the much more limited tools available to us. Unless it turns out that, with this technology, the offense has an overwhelming advantage over the defense, nanotech defenses should almost entirely neutralise the threat from the basement terrorist or careless experimenter. The only serious threat will be from organisations willing and able to spend billions of dollars creating really first-rate molecular killers - almost all of them governments."

(page 272.)

“If spending on munitions really makes a country wealthy, the United States and Japan should do the following: Each should seek to build the most spectacular naval fleet in history, an enormous armada of gigantic, powerful, technologically advanced ships. The two fleets should then meet in the Pacific. Naturally, since they would want to avoid loss of life that accompanies war, all naval personnel would be evacuated from the ships. At that point the US and Japan would sink each other’s fleets. Then they would celebrate how much richer they had made themselves by devoting labor, steel, and countless other inputs to the production of things that would wind up at the bottom of the ocean.”

- Thomas E. Woods Jnr, in Meltdown: A free market look at why the stock market collapsed, the economy tanked, and government bailouts will make things worse. (Page 105).

This is a marvellous, succinct and pretty devastating indictment of bailouts and an excellent little primer on the Austrian school’s analysis of the business cycle and the role of money. I thought I knew quite a lot about the subject but this book explains the idea of money, as a claim on resources, and the importance of understanding the balance of supply and demand for savings, quite beautifully. The book also highlights how the sharp recession of 1920-21 ended with no bailouts and is an episode that seems to baffle Keynesians.

Rather amusingly, this has been a New York Times best seller, much to the chagrin, no doubt, of NYT columnist Paul Krugman. Krugman, needless to say, believes that the sort of massive government spending seen during WW2 helped end depression. To think that he actually won a Nobel. Oh, wait a minute...

Here is a good-looking study of India, a country that, as we occasionally point out, has been and is playing a much bigger role as an economic power. I am pretty upbeat about India's prospects.

By the way, the review of the book (H/T, Stephen Hicks), makes a passing swipe at the Economist magazine that will gladden the heart of that publication's tormentor, our own Paul Marks.

Madsen Pirie has a new book, 101 Great Philosophers. It's an amazingly compact account of the ideas of those who made modern thought. It's a heroic venture, romping through the giants of Western civilization at a cracking pace which allows only 400 words on each of them. The result is a highly condensed overview of philosophy and philosophers, enough to give even a beginner a working grasp of what it's all about, but with enough meat to interest philosophers themselves in his take on the subject.

It takes a cool analytical brain to do this (which Madsen has), and he has produced a book that will lead many into a subject they had previously only wished they knew more about. I rather think that academic philosophers will disparage it, largely because it demystifies their subject. Their careers are made by writing technical papers for each other that bear little on what philosophy can offer to our lives.

In an age when people demand condensed information they can absorb quickly, I think Madsen has produced a book that delivers the goods. Its available from Amazon, and it's a fascinating and highly informative read.

David Gordon, a US writer, has a good review of a book called, unambiguously, The Case for Big Government by Jeff Madrick.

I liked Gordon's final paragraph, which is worth waiting for. Assuming his review is fairly based, it is amazing how lame, or downright thin, are the arguments for big government. It is a sort of backhanded compliment to the efforts of free marketeers that collectivists should still feel the need to write such works defending their views at all. Whenever we get grumpy and depressed about the way the world is going, it is good to remember that the other side cares enough about our views to want to try and deal with them, however shabbily.

Update: thanks to a reader for spotting my error in the name of the reviewer. My bad. Now fixed.

Books that try to convey important philosophical ideas can sometimes be a bit of a struggle to read. Much as I liked Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged for the sheer sweep of the novel and the way it tackled all manner of topics, I'll be the first to concede that some folk out there will find that type of book a daunting read. But a shorter, and highly engaging, example of something rather similar has been out for a few months now: "Old Nick's Guide To Happiness", by Nicholas Dykes.

I will not give the plot away but to say that Mr Dykes' novel is based in the wilds of Scotland, focusing on what happens when a young man, who is shortly to head off for Oxford as an undergraduate, gets lost and hurt during a hiking expedition in the Highlands, and how he falls in with a rather unusual couple living there. There are lots of discussions of philosophy and ideas along the way, but is done in such a charming way that the reader, whatever their views, will not feel they are being lectured at. Admittedly, if you are a religious fundamentalist, deep Green or hardline collectivist, then this book will drive you nuts.

I have known Mr Dykes for several years and he has been a regular writer for the Libertarian Alliance, among other places. I liked this book very much and I hope Mr Dykes tries his hand at another novel. As he realises, abstract treatises are all very well, but if you can convey ideas through the medium of fiction, with strong characters, a good plot and plenty of engaging detail, it can be far more effective. The Left, if I can be permitted to use that term has long understood this - it needs to be understood by those who work in the broadly classical liberal tradition, too. And the same point applies even more, perhaps, to the world of TV drama and films.

I loved Liar's Poker, and Michael Lewis returns to his old stamping ground of Wall Street to write one of the best summations, in my view, of what happened in the markets leading up to the current woes. I do not buy into all of his analysis but as an entertaining version of events, it is pretty good.

Another good, if flawed account of the problems of the debt-driven economy came recently from Niall Ferguson, the historian. He has good things to say on how the understandable desire for home-ownership - encouraged by political leaders such as Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s - tipped into an attitude which stated that owning a home is almost some sort of "right". If you think about it, paying a mortgage where you own only, say, 10 per cent of the equity is not really ownership, but a form of lease agreement. But I think Ferguson under-plays the role of central banks in the 1990s and 'Noughties in getting complacent over the warning signs coming out of the housing and asset markets, such as gold. He had a recent television series on Channel 4 on this whole process - sponsored, I could not help noticing, by the Cayman Islands - and I was impressed by how Ferguson explained the often eye-watering complexities of derivatives and asset-backed products in simple ways without dumbing it down. Doing good-quality television shows on economics, where so much has to be conveyed by mood and picture, is hard. And Mr Ferguson's modulated Scottish accent is a damn sight easier on the ear than the bizarre inflections of Robert Peston.

This book reviewer says the 1930s were, on the whole, a pretty good time to be British. It is a point of view one does not come across very much, that is for sure. The stock image of the 1930s is the era that saw the rise of the Nazis, the Great Famine in the USSR, the Great Depression, Roosevelt, the Royal Abdication Crisis, etc. But was there more to it than that, at least at home? The book says that British society was in some ways in pretty good shape.

In military terms, at least by the end of the 1930s Britain had evolved what ultimately proved to be a very well organised air defence system, with radar and nifty fighters like the Spitfire. The 1930s was stylistically elegant: the cars of that era looked absolutely glorious.

On the other hand, I would argue that the 1930s was a period in which limited government continued to be under siege and apostles of planning and greater government regulation were gathering momentum, to reach fruition - if that is quite the right word - in 1945 with the election of the Attlee Labour government.

Discuss.

Like a critical, if at times exasperated admirer of the novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, I am interested to read books by people who are sharply critical of her work because it is a sign, as far as I can see, that she is starting to attract proper, scholarly attention. That is surely better than blind hatred or for that matter, Randroid hero-worship.

Hence I was quite intrigued when I came across the book, entitled "Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature." Unfortunately, as this review of it at Amazon demonstrates, the author of the book mirrors a trait of the woman he criticises in one key respect: he writes in a state of furious anger and sarcasm, whiich rather undermines his own effort to take her arguments apart. Rand, for sure, was an angry writer - she had a lot to be angry about - but she was often guilty of abrupt dismissals of philosophers one might regard as giants or at least want to consider more gently: David Hume, for instance. And some of her judgements on aesthetic matters make me rub my eyes in amazement. For example, she regarded Beethoven as "malevolent", which is a pretty bizarre comment on the creator of "Ode To Joy", about as unmalevolent bit of music you can ever hear.

But the fact is that in my mind, much of what she stood for and argued about is as relevant and useful now as it was half a century ago. Her impact on driving a libertarian movement, even if she spurned the term, cannot be denied. On art, for example, I find a lot of her ideas very fruitful in explaining why I respond to some works of art and cannot abide some others. I like the way that she understood, for example, the appeal of so-called "bootleg romantic" culture such as pulp thrillers and popular action film heroes and heroines. I think she played an important role in invigorating the Aristotelian tradition in philosophy and has encouraged me to follow this up by reading writers such as Henry Veatch and these fellows. Meanwhile, I keep coming across references from people saying that the present credit crisis and the governments' response to it is something out of Atlas Shrugged. So it clearly annoys leftists that she is still cited in this fashion. The fact that Rand is part of the current intellectual conversation is one reason why I am not quite as gloomy about the state of affairs in this world than I might otherwise have been. Let's face it, had one of her former acolytes, Alan Greenspan, stuck to his early disdain for central banking before he became part of the system, we might not be in this mess today.

This blog looks pretty interesting for critical fans of Rand.

Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend
Leo McKinstry
John Murray, 2007 (first published in paperback 2008), 435pp., £8.99 in paperback

On the strength of Leo McKinstry's excellent book about Geoff Boycott, I bought this book about the Supermarine Spitfire. I didn't find it quite so entertaining as that first one, but I kept reading, and I kept learning things that I didn't know about this famous airplane.

The basic problem with the Spitfire story, as a story, is that almost all of the excitement comes at the beginning. How was it designed and by whom? Once designed, will it be ready in time for the world-shaping, civilisation-saving contest which all readers know will soon erupt? Well, we know that it will be ready, but how? In what numbers? Who were the insufficiently sung heroes of this story, and who the insufficiently damned villains? And, in the great battle, how exactly did it do? That's the heart of the story, and McKinstry tells it well, or at least (to an airplane ignoramus like me) convincingly. But the Spitfire carried on being manufactured right through the war, all the while being speeded up, enlarged, having its shape made uglier, its armaments made fiercer, its range improved, its weight greatly increased, and its task list expanded. Had McKinstry ignored all this later stuff it might have made a more entertaining book, but that would not have been the story of the Spitfire. As it is, the Battle of Britain only ends more than half way through the book, after which McKinstry takes us on a tour of all the other dramas and developments as efficaciously as he can.

I can't hope to tell you whether McKinstry has all the technical details of the Spitfire story right. Go elsewhere for that kind of review. What I can tell you is a few of the things that stuck in my mind after reading this book, which counts for something because it was actually a while ago that I finished reading it.

A big point that McKinstry makes is that the Spitfire was not in any straightforward sense a triumph of the private sector or a simple case of the public sector being rescued by the private sector. Free marketeers of my acquaintance have often made much of the fact that the ancestry of the Spitfire is to be found in the privately sponsored Schneider Trophy races of the 1920s and 1930s, and of a donation that was made in 1931 by a certain Dame Fanny Houston which kept Supermarine's participation in this contest on track at a time when the government reckoned the Schneider Trophy to be too frivolous to bother with in such economically straightened times. But the idea was always to build airplanes that would eventually be paid for by the government, to fight battles between states and in the meantime to threaten to fight battles between states, rather than merely to win privately organised sports contests.

Besides which, there is a huge difference between building a airplane that is merely fast, and one that is fast and can fight effectively against other fast airplanes. The Spitfire was a huge advance on anything Supermarine or anyone else had built only a few years earlier, and the reason it was built was that warriors and bureaucrats in the RAF and in Whitehall decided that they wanted such a airplane. It was in the context of these governmentally expressed demands that the legendary chief designer of Supermarine, R. J. Mitchell, went to work making his masterpiece.

Mitchell's first effort at a fighter airplane, the Type 244 – as it never got beyond being called, looked a lot like the Stuka, especially from front on, with its down and up wings and its clumsy fixed undercarriage. It was not a success, but Mitchell learned fast.

R. J. Mitchell was a type who is perhaps more familiar in our culture, dominated as it is now by computers and computer graphics, than he was in his own, namely the quasi-artistically motivated techy driven by the desire for design elegance rather than just money, immersed in the relevant technology but anything but your boring boffin in a white coat saying dourly why this dull thing can be done but that interesting thing cannot. A friend enthusing about his iPhone reminded me recently that Steve Jobs is a similarly visionary and driven type of person to Mitchell. Mitchell's working world was more like a genius artist's studio than most people's idea of a technological powerhouse. Paperwork was in a state of permanent derangement. The management of subordinates was haphazard and instinctive, involving long periods during which Mitchell was not to be disturbed. The one oasis of calm and beauty and efficacy was the design itself that he was working on.

Between R. J. Mitchell's body and the mind at the top of it there was a similarly extreme contrast, by the time he got around to working on the Spitfire. He did live to see his greatest creation take its earliest flights, but did not live long enough to witness its great triumph in 1940. This was because he had a particularly unpleasant form of cancer which killed him in the summer of 1937, at the age of only 42. I don't recall hearing the words "colostomy bag" in The First of the Few, the movie they made after the war about Mitchell and the Spitfire, but in this book you get a medically clearer and even more depressing idea of what his last few years and months were like, which only makes you admire him all the more.

The making of the Spitfire in large numbers was the story of Mitchell's studio, scrawled large. Throughout the early chapters of this book, we oscillate between the chaos of the various efforts to have the Spitfire ready for the war in time and in numbers, and the raptures experienced by the few pilots lucky enough to fly one of them at this early stage in the story.

If at any point in this book McKinstry actually explained the technological ins and outs of why the Spitfire's beautiful shape made it such a beautiful plane to fly, I missed this, but beautiful it was, both to fly and to look at. In particular, the Spitfire's controls were incredibly responsive, which made it an excellent platform from which to fire guns accurately, despite the Spitfire not being able (for some complicated reason which I couldn't follow) to have cannons instead of more feeble machine guns. But its guns could not have been fired at all if a decent number of Spitfires had not been ready by the time the battle began, and that story, at any rate to begin with, was a nightmare of confusion and incompetence. That the Spitfire was so small didn't make manufacturing it quickly any easier. Too many workers at once merely got in each others' way.

A succession of men, many of them with hyphenated names and with what we would now call anger management issues, grappled desperately throughout the late 1930s with Spitfire production problems. Seriously, the aircraft industry at that time seemed to consist to an amazing degree of double barrelled chaps yelling at each other, either face to face, or on the telephone, sometimes even driving themselves or each other to suicide.

There were various villains in this story, villains because of their failure to realise the potential value of the Spitfire, and because of the then widespread idea that the wars of the future would be won by bombers rather than fighters. The Trenchard doctrine loomed over the 1920s and 1930s much as the updated nuclear version of the same notion loomed over the world from the late forties onwards. The bombers would always get through, and once through would wreak frightful havoc and end the war in a few hours. Many reacted to the promise of the Spitfire much as a later generation of war theorists were to react to the idea of using laser guns to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. It won't work so why bother? The point is to have your own bombers, so that you can frighten the other fellow's bombers into inactivity. But enough people who mattered were convinced for the Spitfire to be designed, and flown by instantly enraptured test pilots of it, like Jeffrey Quill (David Niven in The First of the Few), and for a large order to be placed with Supermarine.

Which was when the trouble really started. The prototype Spitfire was a wonder, but making lots of Spitfires was something else again. It had an elegantly shaped all metal body, which may have been beautiful to behold and wonder to fly, but was the very devil to manufacture until you were thoroughly used to it.

Especially if you were Supermarine, as managed by people like R. J. Mitchell. A succession of duller but more organised organisers wrestled with the paperwork situation, and with factories filled with random piles of Spitfire parts in random places, and with trying to make sure that, just as a for instance, wings made in this small factory in the south of England would fit onto fuselages made in other small factories, regularly, as I say, losing their tempers with one another. In Whitehall, Air Ministry officials and RAF high-ups fretted, as money disappeared month after month, with very little in the way of finished Spitfires to show for it, and of course, as Hitler's airforce grew ever more menacing.

One of the many Spitfire heroes was Neville Chamberlain. It is now clear that Chamberlain was doing a lot more than merely play for time in his negotiations with Hitler, but to his great credit, Chamberlain did at least understand the value of fighter defence. Way back in 1934 when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had pushed scarce resources at Fighter Command and at the design effort that would bring forth the Spitfire.

Another Spitfire hero was the suitably double barrelled Philip Cunliffe-Lister, Lord Swinton, Air Minister from 1935 to 1938 and the main political driving force behind the Spitfire programme. All of which was no thanks to Spitfire villain, Trenchard doctrine enthusiast, and Chief of the Air Staff Sir Edward Ellington, of whom Spitfire hero Sir Wilfred Freeman said: “he never made the least attempt to do his job or to get to know politicians. He pretended to despise them, but was in fact frightened of them.”

Another Spitfire villain, but of a very different sort, was motor car tycoon Lord Nuffield. Nuffield grandly promised to build an entirely new Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham, and he did. How different, he argued, could mass producing Spitfires be to mass producing motor cars? Very different, it turned out, and for a vital year or two, Castle Bromwich produced nothing but bills and obfuscation. Even if he had been suited to mass producing Spitfires, Nuffield was by this time too old for such a task, but too rich and grand to be sacked.

Until, that is, Lord Beaverbrook sacked him. The story I have always been told was that Lord Beaverbrook made a vital difference to Spitfire production, and McKinstry endorses this orthodoxy. Beaverbrook was definitely another big Spitfire hero. Appointed by Churchill as his Minister for Aircraft Production, Beaverbrook at once started shouting down the telephone at everybody in the proper aviation industry style. McKinstry tells how Beaverbrook once rang up the boss of Supermarine, a man called Craven, at a time when Craven was answering the call of nature. I don't care what he's doing, get him, yelled Beaverbrook. Craven replied, when disturbed in the toilet by the wretched secretary in the middle of this shouting match, that he could only deal with one shit at a time.

Beaverbrook also shouted at Nuffield, and Nuffield decided to put this silly little Canadian newspaperman in his place. Perhaps he, Beaverbrook, would prefer it if he, Lord Nuffield, were to stand aside from the Spitfire programme? Yes, good idea, said Beaverbrook. Exit Nuffield.

No Spitfires were allowed to fight in France in 1940, but come the summer, there were just enough, just a Few, you might say. And the ultimate Spitfire heroes, the pilots, duly won their battle, and their place in history.

I found McKinstry's description of the Battle of Britain particularly interesting, because I've always been interested in that big Big Wing row, as publicised in the movie The Battle of Britain, and which has rumbled on ever since the battle. The most persuasive things I had so far read about this argument have come down pretty firmly against the so-called Big Wing tactic, espoused by 12 Group commander Leigh-Mallory, but vehemently opposed by Park, commander of 11 Group, which was the Group that fought most of the battle, between London (rather expansively defined) and the south coast. Len Deighton, in his book Fighter, for instance, says that the sacking of Dowding and sidelining of Park just after they had won their battle was outrageous. Park's objection to Big Wings, eloquently expounded by Trevor Howard, playing Park in The Battle of Britain, was that large numbers of attacking fighters were all very fine, but that such numbers took far too long to assemble, and by the time they had assembled the German bombers had already bombed. Which was all too liable to mean that they had bombed Park's airfields.

McKinstry doesn't seriously dissent from that judgement, but he does say that Dowding, in overall command, could have been a whole lot more decisive in his handling of this dispute, and a whole lot more flexible in his use of the available pilots and squadrons, than he actually was. The picture McKinstry paints of Dowding is of a backroom bureaucrat of genius, but of a somewhat ineffectual battle commander. Dowding supervised the creation of that famous system of command and control that won the Battle of Britain, and he was one of the first senior RAF officers to spot the importance of the Spitfire, and for that alone he deserves all the garlands he has since had bestowed upon him. But as a day to day battle commander, says McKinstry, he was not the real deal. My take on Dowding, having read McKinstry's take on Dowding, is that Dowding wanted his beloved system to do the job all by itself. For him to tinker with the system as it was doing its thing would be, to him, an admission of the system's imperfection. Which was not really the point, was it? Anyway, fair or unfair, I was glad to read McKinstry's reservations about Dowding, because until now, none of the antagonism that surrounded Dowding at the time has has made much sense to me. McKinstry also expresses reservations about Park, calling him vain and territorial. Basically, McKinstry says that the quarrelling between Dowding and Park and Leigh-Mallory reflected little credit on any of them. The methods they each insisted on might have complemented each other, instead of just being the basis of an ongoing quarrell. Clearly Dowding's system was a wonder, but Big Wings, says McKinstry, had their place. On those occasions, the climactic September 15th battles being one such, when Douglas Bader's huge Duxford Wing was able to get seriously stuck into the Germans, it played havoc with their morale, for the German airmen had been assured that the RAF had been all but wiped out. It was around then that a German famously said: "Here come those last fifty Spitfires", and McKinstry makes that one of his chapter headings. Clearly the feuding British commanders had been doing something very right, to say nothing of the people making the Spitfires.

You can't talk Spitfire without also talking Hurricane. McKinstry reasserts the orthodox view, which states that the Spitfire was better. The German pilots certainly feared it more, much preferring to have been shot down by a Spitfire than by a Hurricane. A few Hurricane pilots who had got used to their Hurricanes but then switched to Spitfires and found it hard to adapt to carried on saying that the Hurricane was the equal of the Spitfire, or even superior. But few others now believe this.

However, the Hurricane did have one huge short-term advantage over the Spitfire. Being made in a more primitive way than the Spitfire, with wood and canvas (rather as I remember assembling model airplanes in my childhood with balsa wood and paint-tightened tissue paper), it was cheaper and above all easier to make. While early Spitfire making stuttered frighteningly, Hurricane building proceeded far more smoothly and rapidly. There were thus Hurricanes to waste in France in early 1940, and plenty more in time for the Battle of Britain. The Hurricane could not have won the Battle of Britain on its own, but without it, the battle might well have been lost. Further proof of the Hurricane's inferiority to the Spitfire is that the Hurricanes were mostly given the job of shooting down the incoming bombers, while the Spitfires tackled the far more formidable fighter escorts. This boosted the kill numbers achieved by the Hurricanes, which was then used by some to argue that the Hurricane was as good as the Spitfire, but of course it proves no such thing.

The biggest difference between the Hurricane and the Spitfire was that the Hurricane was a technological dead end, while the early Spitfires were but the first of many versions. By the end of the war, many thousands of Spitfires had been made, and the manufacturing process, although never easy, always rather unwieldy, soon became as smooth and efficient as it had at first been chaotic. A story I knew nothing about until now concerned the original Supermarine Spitfire factory in Southampton. This was bombed towards the end of the Battle of Britain, but rather than rebuild it, perhaps to see it bombed into rubble again, they decided to disperse Spitfire production into the surrounding area, Vietcong style. It worked. What had begun as a nightmare of disorganisation eventually got smoothed out into a miracle of coordinated effort, much as the war effort as a whole went from absurdity to triumph, albeit at huge cost. And of course, the post-Nuffield version of the Castle Bromwich factory likewise got into its productive stride.

The most glorious and important battle fought by the Spitfire after 1940 was the defence of Malta. There were many crucial moments (I recommend googling the word “Ohio” together with “Malta” if you want to learn about another such) which enabled Malta to hold out and continue to serve as a staging post for supplying the allied armies in North Africa and for disrupting the supplies of the Germans fighting against them. But undoubtedly one of the crucial moments in Malta's wartime story was when the first Spitfires arrived.

Not that the high-ups in Fighter Command (the ones who had replaced Dowding and Park) were much help. It took a scandalously long time for any Spitfires to switch from pointless Big Wing forays across France, to meaningful action in Malta. I recall reading in my long ago youth, in Paul Brickhill's Bader biography, about huge Bader-lead expeditions over France. But why did the Germans bother to attack such formations, and thereby allow themselves to be shot down? I mean, what was being attacked, and what defended? According to McKinstry, the Germans mostly didn't attack and these forays were a nonsense.

Meanwhile, it definitely says something about the Spitfire that its most glorious battle after its first and greatest one was also defensive. The basic task of the Spitfire in 1940 was to take to the air, and immediately to start shooting at incoming attackers, helpfully tracked by radar. That the Spitfires couldn't carry very much fuel was not an insuperable problem. Running out of fuel? Okay. Land, refuel, and then take off again and rejoin the battle. Very hard on the pilots, who would find find themselves flying half a dozen sorties in one day, but basically: doable. The same formula was repeated in Malta.

The Spitfire fought just one other particular battle of significance, towards the end of the war, against the V1 rockets. By the time the V1 appeared, Spitfires had become fast enough to chase after them. But rather than shoot a V1 down and perish in the resulting explosion, the Spitfire would put a wing under the V1's wing and shove it upwards, thus sending the V1 off course. I did not know that.

But the biggest and most important thing, from the war winning point of view, that the later versions of the Spitfire did was to support the allied armies as they slowly advanced towards Germany. They helped to supply that extra dimension of misery to the Germans, by shooting up armoured convoys, wrecking trains, and generally making a nuisance of themselves to every manifestation of Germanity they were able to spot.

Not that spotting from a Spitfire was that easy. Did I mention the Spitfire's engine? This was the great Rolls Royce Merlin, and really, getting on for half the credit for the Spitfire design should go to Rolls Royce, for making the Spitfire possible. But this mighty engine did come with a rather odd price attached to it. It was very big, as fighter engines go, and right bang in the middle of what should have been the pilots field of vision. So, spotting from a Spitfire, if the ground is what you are trying to spot, was not that easy. It also made landing a problem. What they did was come in at a curve, thus enabling the pilot to see where he was going to land past the side of the engine.

This huge engine also made the Spitfire no use as a night-fighter, as the inhabitants of London discovered to their cost soon after the Battle of Britain, when the Germans switched from daylight attacks on airfields and radar stations to night-time attacks on London. The problem was that the Spitfire's engine emitted such dramatic flames and sparks that at night the pilot could see nothing else. That Dowding had nothing to offer by way of defending London was all part of why he got the sack, but it was hardly his fault. He simply didn't have the planes for the job.

Despite such limitations, the Spitfire did perform aerial reconnaissance with great distinction. It is fun, although confusing at first, to read a book where the the acronym PR stand not for the superficialities these letters stand for now, but for photo reconnaissance. What the Spitfire could not do with any distinction at all was protect bombers over Germany. It didn't have the range. McKinstry tells of how a Spitfire was forced to make a landing at a US airbase, and then to beg for fuel to get home, and of how the Americans there laughed out loud at the Spitfire's paltry fuel appetite. Drop tanks were attached, but never very satisfactorily, and besides, more petrol meant less in the way of guns and ammunition. Only for PR did the tanks really work properly, because in that case guns were positively discouraged, the point being to get the pictures back rather than to get involved in any shooting.

So, why did the Spitfire continue to be developed? Why did they not develop other planes more suited to the tasks of war winning rather than merely not war losing? Well, they did develop more planes, such as the Typhoon, the Mosquito, and so on. But entirely new airplanes are hard, and very expensive, to get into production, as the story of the Spitfire itself well illustrates. Every time they were about to forget about building more Spitfires, Supermarine would introduce some apparently rather unpromising Spitfire modifications or apparently minor improvements, and, much to the delight of all the pilots concerned, an extra dose of life would be found in her. Meanwhile, some new airplane which on the face of it had seemed a better bet, for whatever it was they wanted it for, would run into difficulties. So it was that the Spitfire carried on, and on, and on. By the end of the war, both the Russians and the Americans each had over a thousand of them, and the RAF had nearly six thousand. Measured by numbers produced, the Spitfire was the most successful British airplane ever. It carried on in active service into the late 1950s, shooting up Communist insurgents or photo-ing similar efforts by others. The Spitfire continues to delight nostalgic crowds at air displays and ceremonial flypasts.

Talking of finding more life in “her”, the pilots did indeed talk of the Spitfire as a she, and in general as a very sexy machine. And the Spitfire was sexy in another way. There is a bit in this book which reminded me of the passage in The Right Stuff where Tom Wolfe explains how some of America's most beautiful girls found their way to top secret airbases for trysts with the early jet pilots. Much the same went on at Spitfire bases. And when away on leave, any young man with the magic of a set of wings on his uniform, and, better still, who was able to say: yes I am as a matter of fact, when asked if he was a fighter pilot, and: yes I do as it happens, when asked if by any chance he flew Spitfires, was usually well taken care of, so to speak. The young men who flew Spitfires were the alpha males of their generation, much as Grand Prix drivers and Rock Stars are now, the technical back-up for a Spitfire being not unlike what goes on now in the pits at Formula 1 races.

Nor were the Spitfire pilots held back from such pleasures by much in the way of poshly educated reticence, because most of them were not from posh schools. The army had and has posh officers, especially in its posh regiments. But the wartime RAF was much more meritocratic. Could you fly, and when flying, could you kill? That was what mattered. It turned out that most couldn't fly and kill well enough, but that those who could were, socially, a very mixed bunch. Many were definite mavericks, to echo Tom Cruise's call sign in Top Gun, and there was a distinct tendency for the RAF's top guns during the war to be from the colonies, such as the New Zealander Al Deere and the South African Sailor Malan, perhaps so-called because "Sailor" presumably worked so much better than his original first name: Adolphe. Poles and Czechs were also heavily involved in the Battle of Britain, and in the Spitfire story in general, fuelled by a ferocious desire for national revenge.

This book abounds with descriptions by the pilots of their many adventures and near things, my favourite being one when a WAAF who had been doing some maintenance on a Spitfire found herself still sitting on it when it took off. They told the pilot to land, and indeed something did seem to him a bit wrong with how the plane was handling, but they didn't want to worry him by telling him exactly why. She lived to tell her tale, as did many, many more, quite a few of them to McKinstry. In general this book is stronger on human interest anecdotage than in technical explication. There is a definite air in this book of "let's get these stories written down before the people who can tell them to us have all died", and quite right too.

Us Brits now feel a whole lot better about how we contrived not to lose World War 2 at its beginning than we do about the fact that we ended up coming a rather distant third, with our last throw as a military superpower being to participate enthusiastically in the mass incineration of German civilians. Few of us minded this much at the time, but most of us are unhappy about all that now and prefer to hark back to 1940. Yet, oddly, Dowding, who commanded the British side in the Battle of Britain, is not now that well remembered. He was no Nelson with his band of brothers, brotherliness being the exact quality that Dowding so crucially failed to instill into his key subordinates, and nor was he much good at schmoozing with superiors, or with politicians. Dowding, whose nickname was "Stuffy", lacked the knack of eliciting a warm and spontaneous human response. Simply, he was not loved.

But there was nothing stuffy or unlovable about the Spitfire. As McKinstry says, it is indeed odd that the principle weapon of the victorious side in the Battle of Britain is now better remembered than the man who actually commanded the victorious side. Yet so it is, and so it probably always will be. The perfection and simplicity, and sublime individuality, of the Spitfire's shape, and the decisive contribution it made to the victory, will always ensure this.

Oh dear, I too am harking back to 1940. But it is that kind of book, I'm afraid. I found the 1940 stuff very intriguing, and the stuff before it, when they were building Spitfires for the first time, downrght fascinating. After 1940, I continued reading more as a duty, to find out if anything more of overwhelming interest was said so that I could pass it on here. The later chapters of this book certainly have their moments, in Malta, and when those V1s were being shoved off course, by hand as it were. But as I said at the beginning of this review, the beginning of this story is where the best bits are.

A few days back, I pointed out what a collection of dishonest, inaccurate drivel was contained within Naomi Klein's recent book, in which she wrongly accused the late Milton Friedman of, among other things, supporting the invasion of Iraq (he opposed it, as a cursory Google search could have shown her). Jonathan Chait, of The New Republic, a left-leaning US publication, also stamps hard on the woman.

Now, I might disagree with the late Professor Friedman about the rights and wrongs of invading Iraq but what interests me is why some people on the left, and the right for that matter, get themselves so confused about what the likes of Milton Friedman were about. And yet his views are hidden in plain sight, or not hidden at all. He was, in the best sense of the word, a liberal. He opposed the War on Drugs. He opposed military conscription. (Does Klein?). He thought sexual relations between adults was no business of government. He opposed censorship. He opposed robbing the poor of their savings via inflation. He opposed trade union closed shops as injurious to the non-unionised worker. He opposed exchange controls and countless other controls on our lives, of all kinds. He supported school vouchers as beneficial for the children of the poor and politically overlooked. Being the son of poor Jewish immigrants, Professor Friedman was a classic example of the American Dream. His influence on American public life, and the wider world of ideas, was and still is immense.

At some gut, non-intellectual level, Ms Klein knows this. So instead of wrestling with such ideas, she has to create this conspiracy-theory: that free market ideas depend on there being brutal shock events to succeed. Really? Now, it may be true that crises such as hit Britain in the late 1970s may sweep pro-market governments to power, but there is nothing pre-ordained about this. Instead of a Maggie, we could quite easily have elected an extreme socialist government dedicated to total state central planning, as has indeed happened before. Wars and recessions are typically no friend of small government, or of the open society in general.

Ms Klein is a moron. The smarter parts of the left are starting to notice.

I must admit I have tended to view Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo, the anti-capitalist book, as a committed socialist but not obviously a downright liar. If this scathing review of her recent book, The Shock Doctrine, is accurate, then she he has appallingly traduced the late Professor Milton Friedman, accusing him of holding attitudes that he did not actually hold, such as over the recent invasion of Iraq (she claims he was for it, in fact he opposed it). The book, according to the review, reveals that she cannot figure out what the difference between a classical liberal and a neo-conservative is, for example. As the reviewer, Johan Norberg makes clear, a lot of "shock" events, like terrorist attacks, wars and hyperinflation do not work in the interests of classical liberals, but quite the opposite. In Weimar Germany, inflation destroyed much the middle class, helping to pave the way for Hitler. Wars have been used by national leaders to justify big increases in government powers that are often not rescinded. And so on. Klein either knows this, or cannot be bothered to mention it as it does not fit into her thesis.

Anyway, read the review. It is superb.

Apologies: I got the woman's surname wrong, now fixed.

Geoff Boycott: A Cricketing Hero
Leo McKinstry
first published by Partridge, 2000, fully revised and updated edition published by Harper Collins, 2005

Sportsmen seem to be arranged along a spectrum. At one end are those who are so naturally gifted that their careers are, to them and to us, a gift. They don't have to think about it, they just do it, with supreme grace and style. You watch them, and marvel. You think: I could never do that. But glory be, homo sapiens can do it. Because look, he just did it, although heaven knows how. At the other end of the spectrum are sportsmen of relatively average talent, who, by supreme effort and constantly applied strength of mind and character, make the most of what they have, often defeating more naturally gifted opponents who haven't learned to fight until too late. These talent maximisers do better than they have any right to, so to speak. You watch them, and you think: If I tried that hard, I could do that do. You probably couldn't, because you are probably as lacking in the necessary mental strength as you are lacking in natural talent (and they actually have rather more natural talent than you do along with their superior mental attitude), but that's what you think while you watch.

When cricket fans like me think of supremely gifted cricketers, we think of players like David Gower. Gower unforgettably (I watched it live on TV!) hit his first ball in test match cricket for four, as if he had already been playing cricket at the top level for half a lifetime. And when we think of cricketing talent maximisers, the men who make the absolute most of what they have, we think of Geoffrey Boycott.

Because they have to think so hard about their game, the talent maximisers tend to make the best coaches and the best commentators. Having made the most of their own talents, by analysing relentlessly what needs to be practiced and applied on the pitch, and having applied their conclusions with total discipline and single-mindedness, they are ideally prepared to bring the best also out of others with similarly imperfect natural gifts. The talent maximisers are likewise well prepared to explain what's happening to us ignorant onlookers, because they have been analysing this relentlessly for the previous twenty years. Thus it is that Geoffrey Boycott, having been for so long such an effective and successful - if often hideously slow-scoring - opening batsman for his beloved Yorkshire and for England, is now a very skilled coach and one of the world's most effective, sought-after and immediately recognisable commentators.

I don't usually read sports biographies. Niagaras of cliché, most of them. But when I saw the names of Geoffrey Boycott and Leo McKinstry on the cover of what was obviously a widely selling paperback (if it wasn't widely selling it wouldn't have been in the sort of shop I saw it in) I didn't hesitate. McKinstry is a writer already known to me, and probably to many other readers of this blog, in particular for his many Spectator pieces over the years. Boycott is Boycott, still a unique figure in English sport. He is still commentating now on international cricket, in his typically trenchant, no-nonsense style, and in that delightfully immitable Yorkshire accent of his. He is also a man who seems to proceed through the world surrounded by a force-field of controversy and confrontation, in both his cricketing and his personal life. Yorkshire cricket has been plunged into such rows in recent decades that no cricket fan however casual could fail to notice, and nor is any cricket fan like me unaware of the black cloud of tabloid coverage concerning Boycott's trial and conviction for assaulting some woman or other, whom he was having a fling with, or something. Many, me included, used at first to suppose that Boycott was gay, but more recently a very different, very un-gay and now not nearly so private Boycott life hit the headlines. What was that all about? I knew that even at new-in-a-real-bookshop full price this book had to be worth a punt, and I was not wrong.

First things first. It's a good read. Whether someone less excited by cricket and less interested in Boycott would enjoy it, I don't know. Maybe not. But I loved it. It was my holiday reading during a recent trip to Brittany. Travel can involve much waiting around, and your usual diversions are mostly absent. A good book is a necessity, and this one did that trick for me splendidly.

As for the story it tells, the word that keeps cropping up again and again is "selfishness". The chances are that any sportsman who, selfishly, concerns himself relentlessly and successfully with the quality of his own personal performances will be a major asset to his team, but Boycott tested this principle to destruction, again and again.

He did this most notably in the matter of his running between the wickets. Do I have to explain what "run out" means, to Americans, women, etc.? It's probably the one cricketing technicality that you just have to grasp if you are to have any proper understanding of the Boycott phenomenon. (For a general description of cricket, try this.) At any one time during a cricket match, there are two batsmen out there, one at each end, rather than just the one at the one spot like in baseball. When one of the batsman hits the ball out into the field, occupied by the fieldsmen of the opposing team, he and his partner at the other end must change ends if the batsman who hit it is to score a run, change ends twice for two (i.e. go to the other end and then back again), three times for three and so on. But if the fielding side gets the ball back to one of the wickets and breaks them with the ball before the batsman in question has got to his ground and touched his bat down, that batsman is "run out", and has to leave, just as if he had been bowled out or caught or out lbw (don't ask). Running between the wickets therefore requires cooperation and mutual trust between the two batsmen, often with one of them saying yes, let's have a run, and the other just having to hope that his mate has got it right, because if his mate hasn't, then as likely as not he could be the one who gets run out.

And Boycott's running between the wickets was, shall we say, famously variable. This was the one major aspect of the art of batting that Boycott simply refused to master. Oh, he mastered the art of not himself getting run out. But time and time again, the other fellow would find himself stranded between the wickets, having responded to an absurd Boycott call whose entire purpose was to enable Boycott to keep the strike, and have to disappear, fuming, to the pavilion. There he might later confront a totally unrepentant Boycott, or he might decide that it just wasn't worth the bother.

For Boycott, the runs scored by his own team were like a fixed sum. Either he got them or those other bastards in his side did. On one occasion, his opening partner contrived the impossible, and actually succeeded in running Boycott out, in a test match in the West Indies, on a plumb batting pitch. Boycott spent the rest of the day telling anyone willing to listen to his griping that "that bastard is scoring my runs". And if the rest of the team were rubbish ("roobish") who weren't going to get those runs if Boycott didn't, well then, all the more reason for Boycott to drop anchor and bat all day at a snail's pace.

Sometimes Boycott would apologise after running somebody out, in the sense of make a great public fuss of how sorry he was. But McKinstry tells a revealing story of how, having run out some other England batsman in his usual blatantly selfish way that the aggrieved batsman is still sore about to this day, Boycott indulged in a great drama, putting his head in his hands like some ham actor, to communicate to everyone how desperately sorry he was. But close examination of the video record reveals the real story. First, Boycott ruthlessly and calculatingly checks that he himself is not going to get out. Then, realising that the other fellow is now getting out and this is going to make Boycott look very bad, the gears in Boycott's head engage, and the regretful performance only then begins. From the boundary's edge you couldn't spot the deceit. On closer-up video, the ruthless incompetence of Boycott's running between the wickets and his indifference to all the misery he caused to his supposed colleagues, again and again, is clear.

This book is crammed with anecdotes concerning Boycott's sheer nastiness to professional colleagues. He really was not a team player. McKinstry relates how David Gower, having resisted the might of the West Indian fast bowlers at their frightening best for an hour or more, then got himself out to the occasional bowling of Viv Richards and returned, seething, to the pavilion. I could see it coming, said a gleeful Boycott to Gower as soon as Gower was back in the dressing room. You were getting casual! Sloppy! I could see you were going to get out! Exclaimed the usually equable Gower: Oh, put a sock in it Geoffrey. There, says McKinstry, you have it all. Both the perfect reading of the game, and the simultaneous doltishness of parading that understanding at exactly the wrong time, in front of the one person in the world who really does not want to be told about it just now thank you.

My favourite, if that's the word, Boycott-is-a-bastard story in this book concerned a little clutch of Pakistani boys who had gathered outside the back of the pavilion to get Boycott autographs for their notebooks. So Boycott arrives in his car, which is covered in the dust of Pakistan. The boys clamour for their autographs. Boycott says not now, but I tell you what, you clean my car and when I get back you can have your autographs. When Boycott returns, he gets into his now immaculately cleaned car and just drives off, leaving the boys stunned and autographless. What a swine.

The frequent imperfections of Boycott's running between the wickets paled into insignificance when set beside the awfulness of his various attempts to be a cricket captain. The problem wasn't Boycott's grasp of cricket. There was nobody better at reading a game and seeing what was needed. The problem was that Boycott cared far more about his own batting, and about himself in general, than about anyone else in his team, even when he was supposed to be captaining it. If, when captaining, he personally got out for a small score, he would do his usual two hour sulk with his head wrapped in a towel, and if any of the other batsman in his team might have benefited from his guidance about the nature of the bowling or the pitch or the state of the game, well, basically, to hell with them. They were on their own, just like Boycott himself.

Yet through it all, the runs piled up. When Boycott started out for them in the early sixties, Yorkshire had a number of great cricketers in their side, such as the great Fred Trueman to name but one. But as Boycott's career developed, the uniquely incompetent managerial style of the Yorkshire committee, who were apparently a sort of collective Boycott in their man-management skills, resulted in a steady drain of top talent away from the club. Throw into the mix the refusal of Yorkshire, for several decades after all the other counties had abandoned such notions, to make use of any cricketer not himself born in Yorkshire, and Boycott rather suddenly became the only thing that your average Yorkshire cricket fan-stroke-fanatic could feel good about. So even as Boycott continued to exasperate his team mates, the mere supporters adored him more and more. Boycott had made the most of what talents and skills he had, damn the world, and most of the fans prided themselves on doing much the same. They identified with him, and worshipped him. When he batted, he was batting for them.

It was a disastrous cocktail of feelings. Boycott's profound understanding of the mere technicalities of cricket convinced him that he ought to be the captain of Yorkshire and of England for as long as he ever played for either. Yet his frequent acts of nastiness to people who were supposed to be on the same side as him, which was not helped by his alcoholic abstemiousness and general refusal to muck in on the social side, caused him again and again to be loathed by the very people whose support he most needed in order first to get and then to make a success of the captaincy of cricket teams.

Boycott the batsman refused to be deflected by Boycott the captain into playing more for the team and less for himself and for his records and averages. Time and again, a Boycott-lead Yorkshire team would need quick runs, to get batting bonus points or to win run chases, yet Boycott the batsman would grind out his usual pile of slow but now ever more irrelevant runs, watched by colleagues torn between lingering admiration and growing contempt. On one amazing occasion when quick runs were needed, Boycott had done his usual slowcoach act, but this time, when he did finally get out, the next two batsmen just said to themselves: fuck it. Instead of accelerating in the way everyone present assumed they would, they carried on scoring with agonisingly Boycottian slowness, in a spontaneous protest. In such an atmosphere, it is little wonder that such a high proportion of the relatively few half decent Yorkshire players still left buggered off to play for other counties, or even emigrated, to get as far away as possible from the mess. Because, by the nineteen seventies and eighties Yorkshire cricket was a truly frightful mess, as McKinstry explains very well. The Committee, having decided to sack Boycott as captain, found itself humiliated by supporter power, and Boycott was effectively handed control of the entire club. Not that he did anything positive with that control. Yorkshire only got back into the swing of winning county cricket after Boycott retired, or rather, was retired. He probably still had two or three more decent years of batting in him, but by then everyone who mattered, even most of his formerly fanatical supporters, were sick of him.

But, there remain all those runs. You win cricket matches, as our current much admired England test captain (and Yorkshireman) Michael Vaughan never tires of saying, by putting lots of runs on the board and putting pressure on the other side. And Boycott was the supreme run-getter. For a brief moment his total of test match runs was the highest there was, by anybody anywhere. Sunil Gavaskar of India, and since him many others - David Gower included, no doubt to his profound satisfaction - have sailed past Boycott's total of 8114. But test matches are far more frequent than they used to be, while the bowling of Boycott's time was as formidable as test match bowling has ever been, and he opened, remember. McKinstry convincingly argues that Boycott, far from shirking it, as was said at the time by some, was actually one of the best batters against super-fast bowling there has ever been. It was his cussedness and social ineptness that got him dropped for a while by England, not any fear of fast bowling on his part. When he returned, he made centuries against Michael Holding and Dennis Lillee, and opposition teams always rated him very highly, celebrating hugely whenever they got him out.

One of the oddest moments in Boycott's career came near its beginning, when he scored a sparkling, Man-of-the-Match-winning 146 against my own Surrey in the Gillette Cup Final of 1965, much to my mortification when as a teenager I heard it described on the radio. Sparkling? Sparkling? Scored by Boycott? Indeed. He began in his usual leaden fashion, despite this being a limited-overs game. But then the legendary Yorkshire captain Brian Close came to the crease and commanded Boycott to pull his finger out. Boycott denies that Close said any such thing, but Close says he did and I know who I believe, as does McKinstry. What other explanation for such an anomalously rapid and entertaining Boycott innings could there possibly be?

I mention this episode, and Boycott's probable mendacity about it, because just when Boycott's commentating career was getting truly into its stride, an episode occurred which damn near finished it, and what you think about this circumstance hinges on whether you think Boycott is in the habit of telling the truth.

Boycott has always, it seems, had an eye for the ladies, especially glamorously self-supporting and professionally self-driven ones (i.e. the sort who won't become dependent upon him), and has also always had the trick of chatting them up successfully. One such lady had an argument with Boycott in a French hotel room during which she fell and received a bump to her head. It was an accident. This lady was, although glamorous, not at all self-supporting. Badly in need of large quantities of cash, actually. And by the time she had finished embroidering the story Boycott was a violent and misogynistic woman-beater. Worse, far worse, Boycott was convicted of such a crime in a French court of law. It was his word against hers, and another lady, the French judge, took her word for it, as did a subsequent French appeal judge. Says McKinstry of this episode:

Boycott was, in my view, a victim of cruel injustice at the hands of the French judicial system. The evidence against him had been absurdly weak, the conduct of the case farcical. His entire career and public repuation had been disastrously undermined by a woman who had indulged in a form of blackmail, and had been described in the British High Court in a separate case as 'fraudulent and dishonourable'.

The British case being her bankruptcy case. McKinstry assembles copious evidence to back up this damning judgement, damning, that is to say, of the dishonest and money-grubbing woman and of the French legal system that backed her word rather than Boycott's. I believe Boycott's version of these events rather than that of his adversary and tormentor, but not because Boycott never lies, which is what McKinstry rather oddly says. It's all the other evidence that McKinstry lays out that I find convincing. This is the one note in McKinstry's book that jarred somewhat.

That Boycott's commentating career survived this horrible episode is largely because of all the countries where his commentating is admired besides prim and proper England, with its stuffy institutions and pious, pompous, humbug-ridden tabloid press, where even the false suspicion of violence towards a woman gets you cast out of polite society. I knew that I liked Boycott's commentating, but I had no idea, until I read this book, how much he is liked in, for example, India. Here the bluff Yorkshireman act results in giving credit where credit is due, without national, ethnic or cultural bias of any kind. Interestingly, while others have denounced Pakistan's great recent pace bowlers for ball tampering, it is Boycott who has insisted that everyone does it on the quiet. He has also defended Muralitharan's controversial bowling action. The white fellows only complain about brown bowlers, Boycott implies, because they can't play them properly, and the further implication is that he, Boycott, if he were only twenty years younger, would have been able to handle them far better. You can see how this would be popular in foreign parts. The Indians also like Boycott's commentaries because they are clear and direct, unlike many of their rather flowery local wordsmiths.

What I do believe is that Boycott plays the part of the blunt truth-to-namby-pamby-southerners Yorkshireman raised by coalminers and pigeons in a cardboard box, etc. etc. Because, at heart, Boycott is one of life's performers. Once you get that, it all snaps into place. Great with audiences and crowds but relatively bad – often disastrous - with individual people face-to-face. Also, great with the right sort of woman, such as a woman who gets all this and who respects it – often because she is some kind of performer herself. The obsessive preparations for each performance, with the kit and the costume all just so, at first for the batting, now for the commentating. Underneath it all, there is the hope that the performance will be understood as a performance, to which the appropriate response is another competing and contrasting performance, rather than just slinking away and sulking or moaning about the rudeness of the Boycott performance. And all stirred into this is the fear that there is only so much limelight to be competed for and that you have to stake your claim for it, or some other bastard, as likely as not some more naturally gifted and less deserving southern consumer of gin-and-tonic, will upstage you. Don't let him, unless he's proved he's earned it.

It is revealing that some of Boycott's staunchest admirers are often people whom he started out being rude to, but who, instead of surrendering meekly and being content to badmouth him to journalists behind his back, instead read Boycott their own version of the riot act, straight to his face. After that things would often be greatly improved. Many are the "after I said all that I had no further trouble with him and we got on fine" stories in this book. And actually, on the quiet, when he felt at ease with people, with people who weren't felt by him as any sort of threat, Boycott could and can be very kind and generous, depending on his mood. Once his playing career ended, he started to show what a brilliant coach he might eventually have become. Trouble was, the money he could make as a commentator was so huge by comparison that no mere cricket teams could ever match it.

Just as that cloud of French legal dirt was clearing away, not least, I daresay, because of McKinstry's own writings about it all, in the first version of this book and elsewhere, and just as his commentating was getting back on track, another terrible enemy stepped forward to challenge Boycott's character and courage and fighting spirit. Cancer is something of an equal opportunities killer, often picking out the very people who have been most fastidious in their personal and dietary habits. Along with smokers and sunbathers, it grabs those who do not in any way deserve to be grabbed by it, and cancer grabbed Boycott by the throat, literally. The doctors were going to operate but then decided that the risk to the Boycott voice, now also Boycott's fortune, was too great. So, chemotherapy. Horrible. But Boycott battled his way through that as he had battled and batted his way through so many other ordeals, and triumphed yet again. As I say, he is, as of now, still commentating away, giving as good as he gets, mellower now since his recent brush with death, but still the same acute observer of the game he loves and would give almost anything still to be playing.

If you are still with me here at almost the end of this long posting, you can surely tell that the length of it is a measure of the pleasure that this book has given me. I enthusiastically recommend it to all who love cricket and the diverting range of people who play it and talk about it. And if you merely would like to understand cricket, here might be a good place to start.

For me, what Boycott's life illustrates, among much else, is that people who are "selfish" are just as likely, in among all the inevitable bumps and bruises and resentments, to do favours for the rest of us as are the more altruistic souls who think only of others all the time, never of themselves, and whose reaction to someone like Boycott is to back away in horror. Life is not a fixed sum game, and selfish people like Boycott can often enrich it mightily, for the rest of us as well as for themselves. A less selfish Boycott could never have ground out all those runs and all those centuries. A less selfish Boycott would now be reluctant to cut to the often painful heart of who just made what dreadful and perhaps career-ending mistake on a cricket pitch. A less selfish Boycott would have been killed by the cancer that he has, for the time being, defeated, and most cricket fans would have counted themselves the losers, not just the man himself. A less selfish Boycott would have been so much less interesting. Long may his fascinating life continue.

Nice item on the writings of this wonderful author. I remember watching the TV series Shogun many years ago and remember how enthralled I was.

Martin Baker, the UK journalist - he worked for several years at the International Herald Tribune in Paris as one of his stints - is someone who has realised that there is an untapped seam out there to be mined: thrillers about the world of finance. I have often myself wondered why, considering how much news is written about financial speculators these days, that there have not been more novels with speculators and the like as the main characters. There are some exceptions: there is Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of The Vanities; there is, of course, Ayn Rand's great celebration of capitalism in Atlas Shrugged, although the book is more about industry than money-lending. The novel Cash McCall is a neglected 1950s classic. Occasionally financiers feature in other novels but that is pretty much it. As for movies, ask anyone about a fictional presentation of a Wall Street speculator or City buyout king, and they will say Wall Street, with the glorious Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. And he was supposed to be a baddie, remember.

Mr Baker wants to plug a bit of a gap and he has written a thriller called Meltdown, which came out a little while ago. I picked up my signed copy and a few days ago, I read it. I am afraid I have to say the book comes as a bit of disappointment. If a movie is ever made out of it, it could be toe-curlingly embarrassing unless they sort out some of the plot and characters.

Without giving away a rambling plot, the protagonist is a brilliant young Oxford academic called Samuel Spendlove, who is persuaded to be employed by some shady media types to spy on a bank in Paris, to discover the doings of a proprietary trader who makes gazillions of dollars on deals, to report back on his affairs, and presumably, to bring said shady trader to book. What we get is what I might call the "misadventures of Samuel", a story of a once-innocent academic fallen among knaves. There are sex scenes so bad that I fear for Martin Baker's reputation. And they add nothing to the plot. There is a feeling that we need a least a bit of sex in there to clinch a movie deal for the novel. Much of the dialogue between the main characters is clunky and lacks believability. I have worked in finance and the media and can state without qualification that yes, there are some nasty pieces of work in both, but they do not talk as Martin Baker has them talking, at least not all the time.

Also, the plot does not make a lot of sense, and the central premise: that a single proprietary desk dealer and a few buddies can bring down not just a couple of other banks, but wipe out parts of the global economy, simply does not stand up to scrutiny, although it plays to the notion that bankers are "Masters of the Universe" with deep and dark powers. Of course, there can be spectacular blowups and we are witnessing some of that now, as the recent cases of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns prove, and as Barings and Long Term Capital Management did before it. But the idea that one private bank can cause a major recession seems over the top; to do that, they need the assistance, however unintended, of governments and central banks. For sure, in a thriller, a bit of licence is okay, but you need enough believability to carry the reader along. I do not think Mr Baker quite pulls this off.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment is not the credibility of the plot, but that the character of Spendlove is not quite convincing: he seems too gullible. I never quite believe that such a smart guy could let his media puppetmasters treat him like so badly. We never really find out what motivated his media controllers to act as they did. If I were Spendlove, I'd tell his bosses to get lost and go back to doing something more intelligent instead. He lacks depth; we do not really get to grips with what makes him tick as a character beyond a desire to get some excitement away from the academic world and earn pots of money.

There are good things about the novel, to be fair. Mr Baker knows how finance works or at least he knows about the jargon used around it; he has a good feel for what a dealing room looks like, how people in these places act and he sometimes gets the dialogue right. As a journalist, he has an excellent understanding of how markets move on rumours, how news services like Reuters or Dow Jones cover the news and how bankers' hours get elongated by time-zones. Some of the touches are a bit cliched, but the cliches do not grate too much.

Generally speaking, however, I rate this book as a two out of five, with five as the top score and one as poor. There is a great, contemporary novel to be written that has the doings of financiers at its core and which does not pander to the notion that moneymaking is a zero-sum game. Mr Baker does at least understand, to his credit, that there is a yawning gap in the arts world's treatment of finance. It is a bit of a shame that he has not really filled it. Maybe the next one will be better.

My title of this posting is taken from that fine film, "The Right Stuff", based on the book of the same title by Tom Wolfe. The character who uttered those lines in the movie was Werner von Braun. The reference is to the fact that at the end of the Second World War, a group of German scientists working on the V2 and other rocket systems were captured by the Allies and ended up working on the US space programme, while another lot of Germans ended up working for the Soviet Union.

Via the Andy Ross blog, here's a review of a new book on von Braun.

Of course, no reference to von Braun would be complete without the following song from Tom Lehrer.

In Third Way Britain both the bureaucrats and the nosey neighbours get to spy on you sunbathing nude in your garden.

- A line from a gloriously rude review of an absurd book by our soon-to-be former Prime Minister.

What Sport Tells Us About Life: Bradman's Average, Zidane's Kiss and Other Sporting Lessons
Ed Smith
Penguin books, 2008, 190 pp., £14.99

I rarely buy new books in hardback at full price, because I rarely want any particular book. Usually I am just looking for something that is interesting, and prefer to soften the financial blows by taking my chances in the remainder and charity shops. But something about Ed Smith's little book appealed to me, despite its combination of brevity and a high price-tag. Partly it was that the first three people quoted on the cover saying how good it was were Mike Atherton, Christopher Martin-Jenkins and Michael Brearley, all of them big names if you are an England cricket fan like me, and all people whose opinions I greatly respect. Ed Smith himself is also a name, if you follow England cricket, because he is one of those many unfortunates who played a handful of test matches (his were in 2006 against South Africa), but who was then, somewhat unluckily, discarded. He now captains Middlesex. On the other hand, maybe he won't prove to be so unfortunate in the longer run, because England batting places are now up for grabs again, following several batting debacles in recent months, and Ed Smith, who read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, is just the kind of thoughtful, intelligent type – like the aforementioned Michaels, Atherton and Brearley - whom selectors like to have trained-up and ready to take over as England captain, should they be caught short for one. There are a few broad hints in his book to suggest that Ed Smith has not given up on such hopes himself. He certainly still hopes to play for England again. Meanwhile, I was not disappointed by this book, nor did I feel that the fifteen pounds I spent on it was wasted or bestowed upon an unworthy cause. There are basically two big reasons why I liked it.

The first reason is simply that Ed Smith writes not just about sport, but, as his title suggests, about the psychology, sociology and history of sport, and about psychology, sociology and history in general, merely illustrated by sport, in the sort of relaxedly middlebrow way that I particularly enjoy. Recently I have been doing some teaching, having always wanted to, and there is a lot of the teacher in Smith and in his family. You can entirely see why he is now a county captain.

Smith is, for instance, very illuminating on the subject of what makes a champion sportsman, and what does not. What does not, it seems, is an easy ride in the sport when you were young, fueled by pure talent, but unaided by the strength of character that you didn't need when young, because you were so talented. I recall Geoff Boycott making the same point during a cricket commentary. Boycott said that boys who outclassed their school mates often came a cropper when they moved up to professional cricket, because suddenly they were up against people as naturally gifted as themselves, but they hadn't acquired the mental toughness they also needed. Never having had to fight before, they were unable to fight now. Other less gifted boys, on the other hand, having toughened themselves up with defeats and harder-won victories in their youth, often did better later on. Smith confirms all this so eloquently that I rather suspect Boycott of having read this book himself. But maybe Boycott was just thinking of himself, and of how he personally made the maximum possible use of less that supreme talent, and maybe Smith owes the insight partly to Boycott.

Smith also mentions in particular the younger brother syndrome. Many a sporting younger brother, he says, learned to give of his best, and to prevail against formidable and grown-up as opposed to feeble and youthful opposition, by practicing on his stronger elder brother, in a way that required the maximum possible effort and strength of will. Basketball legend Michael Jordan had an elder brother, for instance, of whom Jordan said: "When you see me play, you're watching Larry." In learning to defeat Larry, Jordan learned to beat the world.

I particularly recommend the bit where Smith tells the story of a certain Billy Beane, who oozed sporting talent when young and who sailed into professional baseball like the superstar that all assumed he would inevitably become, but who, six years later, became "the first player ever to say" that he now wanted to be a scout instead. At which he proceeded to excel! Prepared by the bitter disappointments of his own failed playing career, Beane then became supremely good at bossing the very game that he could not himself play successfully. Struggle as a player, then triumph as a manager, is a pattern repeated in sport again and again. Says Smith: "We never think more deeply than about our profoundest failings. They often form the foundations of our clearest analytical insights." You can see how a bumbler like me, who nevertheless now aspires to teaching excellence, would like that, the exact opposite of the those-who-can-do-those-who-can't-teach cliché. I have reproduced this Beane story at my education blog, here. Recommended, if you do not know this story already, and, actually, even if you do.

Smith also summarises the story of how baseball triumphed over cricket in the USA, which I have copied and pasted here, the point being that there was once upon a time actually quite a lot of cricket in the USA to be triumphed over. It was the Civil War that made the difference, Smith says, because baseball was less complicated for relaxing soldiers to set up and play than cricket. Otherwise the USA might just as well have used cricket to get back at the accursed Brits by beating them at it, in the manner of the West Indians and the Indians and Pakistanis - in fact, come to think of it, in pretty much all the countries outside Britain that now play cricket - rather than by shunning it and playing something else.

I like what Smith says about amateurism. Of course all that nonsense with initials behind your name if you were a professional but in front if you were an amateur was indeed fairly ridiculous (Smith recycles the "F. J. Titmus should read Titmus F. J." announcement that greeted the great spin-bowler Fred Titmus when he walked out to the wicket in his first match, as a professional cricketer). But, perhaps a baby has been lost, along with much snobbish and unjust bathwater. Mark Ramprakash, for instance, is another type of sporting failure, the supremely effective county or provincial sportsman who could not "scale up" to the international game, despite appearing to have all it took and much more. Perhaps if Ramprakash had learned not to take it all quite so seriously, says Smith, he might have made the step-up to test cricket work better. Ramprakash apparently really enjoyed all the practicing he did for his Come Dancing triumph, and was struck by how much everyone else involved enjoyed it too. Maybe if he had made a point of enjoying his cricket more, and his test cricket playing in particular, he might have done it even better.

I really enjoy reading such ruminations, and in general, I consider this book to be a fine addition to the clever-stuff-for-the-intelligent-layman-who-can't-spare-too-much-time-for-reading-but-who-wants-to-be-diverted-and-entertained-in-the-train genre, and its appearance soon in paperback is inevitable, especially given that Penguin is already its publisher. It will be a nice little earner for Penguin as a stocking filler next Christmas, is my bet.

There is another reason why I was happy to have parted with my fifteen pounds for this book. It turns out that, ideologically speaking, Ed Smith is one of us.

Chapter 7 is entitled "Is the free market ruining sport?", and Smith's answer is that far from ruining sport, the seriously (i.e. lashings of money with lots of noughts on the end) free market that has recently emerged in many sports in the age of television has actually brought some interesting and formerly neglected facts about sport to light. The oft-observed way that, in cricket, it is the batsmen who get the knighthoods and the plaudits, but that, on the other hand, it is bowlers who more often than not win the actual games, is supported by what the English counties are now prepared to pay. Effective batsman are relatively easy to come by, and thus relatively cheap, but good bowlers are, if not priceless, then the next best thing, very highly priced, more so than almost all the merely good batters. In American football, the now much freer market in players has revealed interesting facts about who the M(ost) V(aluable) P(layer)s really are. Yes, the quarterbacks of course get paid fortunes. But so too do the hitherto undervalued offensive linemen who protect those same quarterbacks. Very good "left tackles" also now earn comparable fortunes, despite many fans still having to struggle to remember what their names are.

Most revealing of all, ideologically, is Smith's final chapter, which is entitled "Cricket, C. L. R. James, and Marxism". James's famous book about West Indian cricket, Beyond a Boundary, tells of the emergence of West Indian cricket into international prominence, thanks to such legends as the great Learie Constantine (the first West Indian cricket superstar), and then that golden generation of the Three Ws (Weekes, Worrell and Walcott), the spin duo of Ramadhin and Valentine, the uniquely brilliant Gary Sobers, and, just a bit later, the founders of that great dynasty of West Indian fast bowlers, Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith. And James does it not just by writing about the cricket, but about the world that the cricketers emerged from.

Smith notes the current malaise of West Indian cricket, but, making use of the story that James tells so memorably, doubts that it can be easily cured, because the circumstances that made that earlier success are no longer present. Post-colonial resentment and lack of other outlets for intense personal ambition caused West Indian cricket to explode. Neither explosive is now present in nearly such an intense or pressurised form. Merely coaching West Indian cricket better won't be any substitute, Smith reckons, noting that most truly great sportsmen are pretty much self-taught, under only the most relaxed and laissez faire of tutelage (that teaching vibe again), if any. Sporting greatness, in other words, is about individual self-expression, as well as about the social circumstances that stir such ambitions.

Smith nails James as a characteristic twentieth century type, namely the believer in and chronicler of human freedom who nevertheless refuses to see that in calling himself a Marxist he is supporting not a means of liberation but one of the great modern sources of tyranny:

James's book is about achieving excellence in cricket despite being outside the ruling establishment and all its privileges. In fact, that is an understatement. It is about achieving excellence because of exclusion from the ruling establishment. It is about being the underdog, and how that can be more inspiring than being governed by the prescriptive rules of conventional wisdom.

So far so "Marxist", in the class-warfare sense. But then Smith offers another quote about what C. L. R. James's leftist assumptions necessarily lead to when they get into power, from George Watson's The Lost Literature of Socialism:

Socialism necessarily means government by a privileged class, as Lenin saw, since only those of privileged education are capable of planning and governing. Shaw and Wells, too, often derided the notion that ordinary people can be trusted with political choice. Hence the aristocratic superiority of the Bolsheviks, who reminded Bertrand Russell, when he visited Lenin soon after the October Revolution, of the British public-school elite that then governed India. Socialism had to be based on privilege, and knew it, since only privilege educates for the due exercise of centralized power in a planned economy.

Writers about cricket with pretensions towards literariness tend these days to divide either into old school traditionalists in the manner of Christopher Martin-Jenkins, whose fogeyishly antiquated solemnity is often mocked even by other Test Match Special commentators, or else left-inclined 'intellectual' types. Ed Smith dodges past these two stereotypes. He certainly is an intellectual, who likes to mention Thackeray and Wagner and Philip Larkin and Milovan Djilas as well as Bradman and Bannister and Mohammed Ali and Billy Beane. Yet he is neither any sort of blindly traditionalist fogey, not any sort of nitwit about the twentieth century's most mercilessly destructive tides of nitwit opinion. He's read Beyond a Boundary and entirely gets the point of it and entirely rejoices at the wonderful story it tells. But he also sees what is wrong with it.

In the acknowledgements at the beginning, we learn that among the people who read and commented on early drafts of the manuscript of Ed Smith's book was a certain John Blundell. I'm not sure, but I rather think that this is the same John Blundell who is the Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs. On the other hand, this particular John Blundell may be a sports psychology professor of the same name. But if it was John Blundell of the IEA, well done him. Put it this way: if it was him, it makes perfect sense.

I came across this temperately argued but brutal demolition of one of those books purporting to claim that we'd all be a jolly sight better off by letting that misunderstood Adolf H. chap do what he wanted in Europe and Russia and that Britain and those other warmongering Anglos should have minded their own business. The book in question is called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, and written by Nicholson Baker. The reviewer is Andy Ross.

Excerpt from the review:

"Mr. Baker seeks to rehabilitate the interpretation of World War II advanced by isolationists and appeasers in the 1930s. That interpretation was refuted by history itself. If it was necessary for the survival of civilization to stop Nazi Germany from dominating Europe - from replacing freedom with tyranny, suffocating culture and thought, inculcating racism and cruelty in future generations, depopulating Eastern Europe and turning it into German lebensraum, enslaving tens of millions of Poles and Russians, and exterminating European Jewry - then it was necessary to fight the war."

And:

"A book that can adduce Goebbels as an authority in order to vilify Churchill has clearly lost touch with all moral and intellectual bearings. No one who knows about World War II will take Human Smoke at all seriously".

Now, there are good books worth reading that debunk some of the myths of the war, such as that Churchill was a great strategist (he was not and made loads of mistakes), or that Roosevelt was the same (he was not, and unbelievably naive about Stalin), or that things should and could have been handled far better. There might even be a case for selling the "appeasement" line that we should have kept out of the war, at least early on, or bided our time. The trouble is, that most books I have come across selling the isolationist case, such as by John Charmley, for instance, fall down because they fail really to address how America and Britain could have realistically coped with a massive Russo-German fascist empire stretching from Vladivostok to Brest, murdering millions of non-Aryans, dominating international supply routes, and so on. Now of course, we have the benefit of hindsight. Churchill may not have known that Hitler was embarking on mass murder of European Jewry, although he was more alive to this threat than most politicians at the time. But Churchill had a pretty good idea that very ugly developments would accompany a Nazi empire, and of course had no illusions whatever about what would happen to Europe if Stalin's Russia conquered all of it.

It is just about possible, I suppose, that Britain could have struggled on a bit as an independent nation next to such a monstrous empire - assuming we could have lived with an ounce of self-respect by leaving France and the rest in the lurch. As for America, it could, I suppose, have traded on with its southern neighbours, bits of Africa, Australasia and those scattered nations not under communist/fascist rule, but huge parts of the globe would be hostile, poor, nightmarish places. And I very much doubt that we would now be enjoying those fruits of a globalised trading environment that we unashamedly champion today on this blog.

It makes me smile when a grand new book hits the stores proclaiming a supposedly startling new point of view. One of the oldest refrains has been that Britain is run by a clique of super-rich, well connected folk. Robert Peston, a senior BBC journalist who is probably best known to the British viewing public for his jerky speaking voice (how the f**K does someone with such a manner hold down a TV career?), has written a book which, I summarise thus, complains that Britain is ruled by rich people; they are too rich, should not moan about things like high taxes on non-domiciled residents, should therefore pony up their wealth and be a good citizen. So there!

About as original as a BBC drama repeat on a Monday night, in fact. Peston argues that the wealthy, global elite who can supposedly flit around the world seeking the lowest tax regimes, should jolly well stop being so, well, selfish and pay the same taxes as the rest of us. But he gets the argument totally the wrong way round. The vast majority of the population should pay much lower, flatter taxes, so the rich will not need to act in this way. Problem solved, Mr Peston.

It is the existence of great mobility, of the ability by the rich to find the cheapest tax destinations, that acts, however imperfectly, as a check on the ability of socialist and other high-taxing governments from putting up taxes even more. Why do statist organisations like the OECD and others, for instance, bleat about the existence of more than 40 tax havens like the Cayman Islands, the Channel Islands or Monaco? Do you, dear reader, honestly think that they do so out of a fear about criminals stashing away their ill-gotten gains? Of course not. They are worried about "tax leakage". If you are a leftwing politician or some other brand of political looter, you are not obviously very happy if a lot of people prefer to avoid having their wallets lifted.

Peston's books has its interesting features: he writes about the rich businessmen who supported Blair, for example. But to be honest, even this is not terribly original. As long as politicians have the powers they have, control the budget spending that they do, then businessmen will have an incentive to try to carve out what benefits they can for themselves. Back in the 18th Century, the complaints of Peston would have been wearily familiar.

Ultimately, if we worry about the influence of rich people over public affairs, the solution is to shrink the state, so that filthy rich can do what they do best: making shedloads more money by providing others with goods and services that other people want, rather than engaging in political rent-seeking. And Peston need not worry, as he does, about children of the rich making a mess of their lives by inheriting "too much". If governments did not interfere with trust law as they have, then rich parents could stipulate how and when their offspring inherited and spent money, assuming they inherited at all. If some of the children of the rich do mess up, well, so long as the British economy remains dynamic and embraces outsiders with talent, Mr Peston need have nothing to worry about.

For a multiple award winning journalist, this is not a very impressive book. I am afraid I have to give it a "D".

"Smith did believe free markets could better the world. He once said, in a paper delivered to a learned society, that progress required "little else...but peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice." But those three things were then - and are now - the three hardest things in the world to find. Smith preached against the gravitational load of power and privilege that always will, if it can, fall upon our livelihood. The Wealth of Nations is a sturdy bulwark of a homily on liberty and honest enterprise. It does go on and on. But sermons must last a long time for the same reason that walls must. The wall isn't trying to change the roof's mind about crushing us."

- P.J. O'Rourke, On the Wealth of Nations.

O'Rourke's book - a New York Times best seller, according to the dust jacket - is a terrifically well-written, concise look at Smith, who wrote not just WoN but also on moral philosophy, jurisprudence and many other things. What O'Rourke does is tease out some of the contradictions as well as the great insights of Scotland's most famous thinker apart from David Hume (the men were both great friends). What is particularly good is that although Smith was considered - not always accurately - to be the great-grandaddy of laissez-faire economics (he did not invent that term), he was much more than that. He was no ardent minimal statist although he would certainly have been horrified by the extent of state power in our own time. He supported state-backed funding of education for the poor, for example. He was not particularly fond of businessmen and some of his comments on the latter's tendencies to collude smacked almost of that fear of big business that later spawned the madness known as anti-trust legislation in the US and elsewhere. He supported a version of the labour theory of value that was ultimately taken to its absurd conclusion by Marx; but Smith being Smith, he was the sort of man who also kind of understood that the value of something is what people will pay for it, nothing else. I suspect - although I cannot prove this - that Smith had the open kind of mind to accept the marginal-utility approach to understanding prices that eventually pounded the labour theory into dust (although not quickly enough to prevent the horrors of Communist economics).

O'Rourke does not spend a lot of time on the personal life of Adam Smith; there is not much material to go on. As O'Rourke points out, the 18th Century did not suffer, if that is the right word, from the obsession with knowing every facet of a person's private life. Of course, some writers in that period told a lot about the personal lives, like Rousseau did although as we know from writers such as Paul Johnson, Rousseau was an incorrigible liar as well as a deeply unattractive individual. In the main, though, what counted was a man's character. And Smith comes across as an agreeable professorial type: famously absent-minded, talkative, capable of great friendship and devoted to his students (and no, that is not code for his being gay).

I was impressed that O'Rourke chose to write this book in the first place. He's shifted his tempo since the early, raucous years of hilarious books like The Bachelor Home Companion and essays hailing the joys of driving a car with a half-naked woman in the passenger seat. As he has got older, O'Rourke has tackled politics and economics in great style and it is funny how his one-liners are as much of the lexicon of political vocabulary as H.L. Mencken's were 50 years ago (he is probably the nearest thing in journalism to Mencken today, give or take some nuances). O'Rourke still cracks great gags, but most of his one-liners have a serious point and are not just showing off. Here's an example (page 148):

"In the eighteenth century the poor had not yet been elevated to their present status as a valuable souce of fads, fashions and illegal drugs."

Or another one (page 98):

"Never complain that the people in power are stupid. It is their best trait."

James Buchan has done more to write about Smith the man, and his book is pretty good, overall. Buchan paints a highly sympathetic portrait of Smith. It is marred slightly by Buchan's strenuous effort to play down the extent to which Smith can be seen as a great advocate of capitalism. True, as I have said above, Smith was no rigid minimal statist, let alone an anarcho-capitalist like Murray Rothbard, but it would frankly be a bit disingenuous to claim that Smith was anything other than a champion of the open market, limited, small, government, low taxes and free trade. Buchan comes dangerously close to fudging the broadly classical liberal thrust of Smith. Yes, Smith did accept a customs and excise job and yes, it is possible to parse the sentences of his great books, take a sentence out of context, and try and dragoon Smith into the arms of say, Gordon Brown. But students of economics writing are not fooled. Buchan's book is certainly a good read; his account of Smith's travels around France in his role of tutor is good. He also writes touchingly on Smith's final years (he died in 1790 just before the full horror of the French Revolution kicked into gear).

It is in fact interesting that some on the left feel the need to try and claim Smith for their side (I write this with the obvious admission that the word "left" is problematical). Socialists can only try to claim Smith by picking on his occasional jibes at businessmen, building up his support for some kinds of public works and so forth; but they then have to skim over his large criticisms of the dangers of overweening state power and his admiration for the wonders of the open marketplace and the division of labour. But was Smith a "radical" and an "egalitarian"? He was radical, true, in the sense of trying to get to the root of things in explaining how an economy worked but he was not a narrow system-builder in the manner of the French Physiocrats. It is hard to spot any of the truculent, levelling tendencies we see from Tom Paine, William Cobbett or other 19th Century radicals. Smith felt that the landed aristocracy, for all its faults, provided many of the wisest legislators; he was on good terms with Whig politicians like Edmund Burke, who of course later denounced the French Revolution. Smith was certainly no democrat in terms of crude majoritarianism and as far as my reading is concerned, he had a horror of socialist levelling. It is true that he recognised the large inequalities of wealth that existed in his time and which were intertwined with the institution of private property but there is no sign that I can see that he favoured challenging property rights, and indeed he felt the ability of people to sell their labour and services for whatever price they could command was a "sacred" right.

Why are some leftists trying to claim the Glasgow lecturer for their side? This may, in part, be the ultimate form of flattery. Quite what this remarkable man would have made of Gordon Brown as he spends billions of taxpayer's money on a collapsed bank is alas, something we can only guess at. I strongly suspect he would have damned it.

As an end-note, I strongly recommend Arthur Herman's book, The Scottish Enlightenment, for an overview of Smith and his intellectual companions, as well as for a look at what happened later on.

This has been out a while and is now available in paperback so quite a lot of eminent historians have already gushed, justifiably, about this outstanding account of the religious turmoil that seized much of western, central and southern Europe between 1500 and 1700. Diarmaid MacCulloch, a senior Oxford academic, has written what I would chalk up as one of the best-ever accounts of this period. He is ruthlessly fair-minded and sympathetic, fighting the urge to make simplistic points (although there is a dry sense of humour throughout). He makes it clear that the Reformation should emphatically not be confused with liberalism; Luther, Calvin and Knox may have inadvertently set in train some of the moves that have led to a more individualistic society but that was not their primary purpose. And although he is justifiably scathing about the horrors of the Inquisition in Catholic Spain and elsewhere, he points out, for example, that the mania for witch-burning occured both in Protestant and Catholic lands (in my own native East Anglia, the witch-hunting obsessions of the 17th Century led to a lot of brutality, for example).

This is the sort of book I wished I could have read while reading history as an under-graduate. It goes without saying that it has relevance for our own time in figuring out what to make of Islamic fundamentalism, among other things.

The Great Before, by Ross Clark. Great little satire on a world after the Greens have taken over.

Bad Thoughts, by Jamie Whyte. Whyte is a philosopher and writer from New Zealand, now living in Britain. This book is a gem; he cuts through the fallacies and lazy thinking of the current age like a knife through butter.

Beau Brummell, by Ian Kelly. Wonderful and at times moving account of the greatest dandy who ever lived. The man who told gentlemen how to dress. I am still not sure I should wear a cravat to work, though. But I do believe that white tie and tails should be de rigeur for men who want to be taken seriously by the ladies.

Ray Kurzweill, the Singularity is Near. A challenging book, but one of those works that is essential reading for figuring out the direction that the world is heading along. The message overall is pretty optimistic.

The Not So Wild, Wild West, by Terry L. Anderson. A fascinating account of the American West and how society evolved. The basic point is that the frontier was more peaceful than the usual images from Hollywood suggest.

Die Trying, by Lee Child. The Jack Reacher thrillers are wonderful. I am delighted I came across him, thanks to reading the blog of Bob Bidinotto.

P.J. O'Rourke and his study of Adam Smith. O'Rourke, when he resists the urge to tell a gag every sentence, is surprisingly good on the great Scottish economist and philosopher.

Light this Candle, the story of Alan Shepard, America's first astronaut. Still in print - you may have to wait a bit for Amazon to get you the copy from its stock - this is one of the best accounts of the amazing men who made up the space programme. Shepard was hard as nails and a sometimes difficult man to deal with, but without his determination to be the best, the progress of the space program would have been far slower.

Enzo Ferrari, by Richard Williams. Splendid account of the man who helped create some of the goddam-sexiest, fastest and most desirable motor cars on the planet.

Dynasties: Fortune and Misfortune of the World's Great Family Businesses, by David Landes. Landes is one of the most interesting writers on business and the process of getting wealthy in the world today.

How to Fly a Plane, by Nick Barnard. I want to do flying lessons when I get the time and the cash. This is a great book to introduce important concepts and has plenty of nice photos to whet the appetite. Now, can I buy an English Electric Lightning or P-51 on e-Bay?

I recently finished reading Jonathan Knee's book, The Accidental Investment Banker, chronicling the period of 1994-2003 during which time our slightly jaundiced writer was working for two of the leading practitioners of mega-mergers and initial public offerings (IPOs), Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. As someone who has worked on the fringes of this world here in London, I could relate to quite a lot of Knee's account. At the heart of it is his argument that investment banks have gone from being supposedly impartial providers of advice for long-term clients to mercenary hired guns willing to pump up any stock, sell any junk bond, to the highest bidder. He wishes to see investment banking give up this sordid activity and resemble the ideals (please try not to laugh) of the legal and medical professions.

This is all written with passion and a lot of detail; if you want to know how Philip Purcell, the former head honcho of Morgan Stanley, plotted to remove rivals or vice-versa, or how investment banks can be open to conflicts of interest, this is the book for you. But at the end of this volume I had no real clear answer to the question as to why a self-declared liberal (in the American usage) like Knee soiled himself working for these ghastly banks doing their ghastly IPOs and mergers at all (sorry for my sarcasm). Or maybe those mega-buck salaries eased the pain a bit (now you are being very sarcastic, Ed). Frankly, to be rude, Knee comes across as a bit of a prig; also, I find his naivete about the world of modern finance frankly a bit hard to take. Banks want to make money and this should hardly be a shocker; if you expect Olympian standards of objectivity from an analyst about a stock that the same bank might be underwriting in an IPO, you should not be investing at all and make sure to get a second or third opinion first. And yes, while there was a lot of hubris in the 1990s IT boom, remember that without the entrepreneurial gusto that that "bubble" made possible, I would not now be typing these words on a laptop and putting them onto a blog. It would not have harmed Knee to have mentioned that point. One might as well write about the supposed evils of the 1840s railway boom in Britain while overlooking that it did, after all, make possible loads of fanstastic railways.

In fact, although there are delusional dreamers, shysters and dullards in any walk of life, I tend to find that investment bankers or hedge fund managers or private equity partners tend to be pretty straight folk on the whole; personally, I find such people to be more honest, hard-working and clever than politicians, although just as prone to the error of sometimes believing their own propoganda. I don't think any of the people that Knee writes about could be as guilty of financial crookedness as the Britsh government has been over its shamefully under-priced bid for the London Olympic Games, for example, which have turned into the mother of all money pits. And Gordon Brown's handling of public accounts while he was Chancellor, putting PFI projects' liabilities off balance sheet, would have landed him in disgrace, as happened to Stan O'Neill, former head of Merrill Lynch, who was kicked out after his firm suffered massive write-downs over the US sub-prime mortgages fiasco. When things go wrong in investment banks, people get fired; in politics, they get another cabinet post.

To be fair to Knee, he does not offer any concrete solutions to the ills he claims have gripped investment banks and he also expresses doubt about the need for yet more regulation; in fact, he even concedes that the legislative reaction to the implosion of the 1990s stock bubble and various accounting frauds have arguably made the job of investment banking even worse in ways that are unlikely to benefit clients. On the other hand, he is far too gentle on Eliot Spitzer, who's bout of lawsuits against financial players, while not without some justification, went too far and have played a part in damaging New York as a competitve place to do business, to the benefit of London.

A big hello to any fellow fans of the late Robert A Heinlein enjoying a lazy, low pressure Sunday afternoon. Jim Miller, commenting on a book review by Nisi Shawl, is about to end all that.

Terry Arthur's 1975 work 95% is Crap was a treasure of my youth (current version is simply called... Crap). I found it a library in Lancing, Sussex one summer holiday whilst staying with my grandparents, and it was a source of both amusement and comfort to me.

Finding a pro freedom, anti big-government book was a rare treat and Terry Arthur's work was the first humorous such work I had ever read. The endless nonsense taught by schools and broadcast by the media is very painful to people who know it to be nonsense. And from my early childhood I understood that what the teachers said and what was broadcast via the radio and television was nonsense. Terry Arthur taught me to sometimes smile at it, rather than to always be filled with a mixture of rage and despair (although I would not claim that I did not continue to be filled with rage and despair a lot of the time). With this personal history I was eager to read Terry Arthur's new work - and it did not disappoint.

Mr Arthur examines, normally with total fairness, the speeches and writings of various politicians, journalists and politically connected academics. It should come as no shock to people here that Terry Arthur shows the "reasoning" of these people to be wildly defective - but he also (and here is his true strength) shows their words to be, unintentionally, very funny as well. The ignorance of the "great and the good" (as we say in Britain) is shown in all its glory. But it is not just ignorance of such things as basic economics. The powerful men and women of our time are shown to have no grasp of how to reason. They are shown to contradict themselves, and their "arguments" are shown to be no arguments at all.

What comes over most clearly is the baseless faith in the state that so many of the journalists, politicians and academics have - even when they are claiming to be wary of the ability of government to achieve X, Y, Z. Also the lust for ever more power that lies under the words of these people is exposed. Many of the economic and "social" projects of the powers-that-be (and their supporters in the press and so forth) are also exposed in all their absurdity. So far most people who visit this site will be united in their pleasure at Terry Arthur work - but there are things that may divide us.

For example, Terry Arthur takes a very hostile attitude towards the Iraq war. However, it is at least consistent for someone who (and with good reason) does not believe that government can achieve anything in many fields, to also believe that government will not be much good at "spreading democracy in the Middle East". And although the source of Mr Arthur's knowledge of the Iraq war is the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, he shows none of the desire to claim that the war is an evil plot to spread an "American Empire" that one gets from some people connected with the institute.

Terry Arthur assumes that the people involved in the Iraq enterprise were entirely sincere in their motives. Which, of course, makes what he sees as their utter failure more amusing. One can say Mr Arthur is being unfair to some people involved in the enterprise. For example, Donald Rumsfeld is mocked for saying that the whole military operation would only last a brief period of time (at most five months). However, Mr Rumsfeld was clearly in favour of a very different post war plan than the one that was carried out. The Rumsfeld view of the post war operation was very much like that of former General Jay Garner (the first person to be in charge after the overthrow of Saddam) - go in and overthrow Saddam (for supporting enemies of the United States around the world), then elections within 90 days and hand over power. And if the Iraqis made a muck up of things - well that would be their problem. However, it was decided to go in for "reconstruction" and "nation building" before elections and a hand over of power. This was very different from what Donald Rumsfeld had in mind - and it did not turn out well.

Still Mr Arthur is not writing a history of the Iraq war - and, he could argue, if Mr Rumsfeld really opposed the notion of "nation building" why did he not resign when it was decided that this would be the policy?

However, there are also things that to Americans at least will ring a false note:

Not things like half of high school seniors not knowing that 87% of ten is less than ten. Terry Arthur has always been wary of "statistical crap" and does not claim that exactly half of all seniors in government schools are totally ignorant of basic math - he is just saying that government education is not good, which is true.

However, when Mr Arthur faithfully reproduces the standard Ludwig Von Mises Institute line that the Republican party was founded simply to rob the taxpayers to get money for big business, an American is likely ask "what about slavery?" It is not convenient for pro-Confederacy people to talk about slavery so they tend to down play the anti-slavery motives of the founders of the Republican party - and Terry Arthur's sources are pro-Confederate ones. Of course, these same sources do not like talking about such things as the Confederacy putting on restrictions on overseas trade (for example demanding that ships using certain ports - which, unintentionally, helped the Union blockade) or that the Confederacy followed a policy of higher income tax rates and more fiat money inflation than the Union did - i.e. that the war was not really about resisting Northern big business subsidies.

Still I am being a po faced over serious person again.

However, there is one point in the book where Terry Arthur does the thing he points at so many of the Great and the Good doing - he says something that is unintentionally funny.

This is where Mr Arthur attacks President Bush for being anti immigrant - for example for ordering the building of a fence along the border with Mexico. As Americans will know, President Bush (wisely or unwisely) showed no interest in stopping illegal immigration for years. Also that he had to be dragged kicking and screaming into approving the fence - and that he still has not built it. George Walker Bush may be many things (good and bad) but anti immigrant he is not.

Madsen Pirie has just had two children's stories published. He says that fantasy and science fiction at the children's level is now nearly all fantasy about elves, warlocks, magic swords and supernatural powers. He prefers writers like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, who followed the rules of possible science.

Pirie's books are Children of the Night and Dark Visitor. These are children's stories, and quite exciting ones, too. The thing that strikes you is how much action there is. There are no long-winded asides. Stuff just keeps happening. The other thing is that both are very visual – you can't help visualizing. I wonder if he's after the movie rights.

I read Children of the Night first. Interestingly, it looks like fantasy, set in an alternative earth with barons and bishops. However this one has flying machines (the excellent dragonflies) and blue power globes. It is science fiction dressed as fantasy, and it sweeps you along. I liked the rat. Normally a kid with a pet is the superior partner, but not here; the rat is smarter. There's a great climax as the characters ride out the blast of an anti-matter bomb from a sailing ship. The ending hints at a sequel, which I hope happens because I got to like the characters.

I liked Dark Visitor better. It's hard SF and makes particle physics into child's play. There's a terrific build-up of tension as the mysterious dark ship is probed, and the story rattles along as some of its secrets come out. I liked the kid with attitude, the sleeping stranger who's been on a cycle of deep space missions. This book has some great one-liners, and every chapter ends on a line that makes you turn the page. I found the ending very satisfying.

There's a lot here for adults as well as the target audience of 13 year-olds. I suppose if he turns out books like this regularly, he might build up a following. Children are serial readers of authors they like, and there's enough in these to attract a following.

This guy does not like the Joseph Heller book, Catch 22, one little bit, and gives a decent takedown of the book:

This is by intention a humorous book, a work of social satire. But it consists of basically the same joke over and over again: military people are evil and stupid. They are also stupid and evil. (Did I mention that they are evil? Also stupid?) I found this pretty clever and amusing for about the first twenty pages. But by that time I still had about 450 pages more to go, and the rest of it wasn’t any fun at all.

Absolutely. The problem with such books is that they were written to appeal to folk who no doubt thought that military people were and are inherently ridiculous. In that sense, Heller succeeded: I can think of dozens of lefty acquaintances of mine who have Catch 22 on their bookshelves but they would not be seen dead reading Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or for that matter, the Sharpe novels of Richard Cornwell.

But as Lester Hunt, the reviewer, goes on to argue, if Heller really wanted to show some guts as a novelist, he should have attacked the whole idea of WW2 rather than target the lunacies of military bureaucracy (admittedly a fair target). But then, he would have to argue that it would have been better to let a certain A. Hitler and Co. tyrannise Europe and Asia, with all that would flow from that. Tricky, no?

Perhaps more generously, Heller and other writers of a similar ilk - Kurt Vonnegut springs to mind - might have had enough of reading about the feats of "The Greatest Generation" and rebelled. Perhaps some of this was necessary and right; Heller's book and others of its type hit a receptive audience. Published in 1961, Catch 22 was bound to gain a more avid following from readers increasingly disenchanted with the Vietnam campaign. Heller caught the mood of the times well.

But it is an over-rated book in my opinion, and it is occasionally reassuring to realise that one is not alone in holding that sort of view.

I enjoy the seafaring fiction of writers like CS Forester, creator of Horatio Hornblower, the Jack Aubrey stories of Patrick O'Brien and similar fare. Over the years of reading such books, I realised of course that much of this fiction was based on the real characters who fought in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic war. There are number of them worth mentioning, such as Edward Pellew, the brilliant west countryman; William Sydney Smith, Philip Broke, and many more. And of course there is Lord Nelson himself, a man who has been much written about, with a fresh flurry of books written in 2005 to mark the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar and his destruction of the Franco-Spanish fleet off Cadiz.

If there is one character, however, who comes close to being the main inspiration for the fiction writers, it has to be Thomas Cochrane. Neglected as a biographical subject for many years, he has become a talking-point again, and Robert Harvey's biography of the man, written a few years ago, is a cracking read. I have finally found the time to read it and have rarely been so enthralled by the brilliance, bravery and sheer daring of a real-life character. The son of a hard-up Scottish aristocrat, Cochrane went to sea at what was then the relatively late age of 17 (it was common for young boys to join much earlier). Within a few years, his promise became apparent and he was promoted. By his early 20s, Cochrane was a commander of flair, commanding his little ship, Speedy, in a series of engagements, frequently taking on much larger vessels and using his skill and trickery to beat them.

A few years after Trafalgar - in which he did not take part - Cochrane, who was not a popular man with his jealous and pompous Admiralty governors, led a fireship raid on the west coast of France. Although the raid was a general success, several ships that could and should have been destroyed were left intact because the admiral in overall charge of the operation, Lord Gambier, was over-cautious to the point, arguably, of cowardice. Cochrane later made harsh comments about Gambier and the whole affair ended up in a very unpleasant courts martial. Cochrane's public career went into freefall; he was framed in a fraud case and sent to jail. He had a political career as a radical MP; and later, in an astonishing revival of his naval career, Cochrane went south to help form the Chilean navy, and played a full part in the overthrow of the old Spanish empire. He lived to a ripe and contented old age.

If Cochrane had his weaknesses to balance his many good points - he was a humane leader and loathed the barbaric naval practice of flogging - they were a large measure of vanity, a hot temper and inability to suffer fools gladly. Harvey's biography of Cochrane very fairly draws out these points, but at no point does Harvey succumb to the tedious modern mania for showing that any extraordinary person has feet of clay. Cochrane was treated appallingly by many people, who were frequently ungrateful and uncomprehending of the skills needed to guide sailing ships in conditions of war. (One of his trademarks was sailing raids at night, often in treacherous condtions without modern navigation aids like radar).

When, back in 2005, I walked about HMS Victory at Portsmouth, and imagined what it must have been like to sail such wooden ships into battle, with all the discomforts, brutal discipline and harshness of such life, it made me feel very humble indeed. The naval men of Nelson and Cochrane's age were a remarkable generation, the likes of whom we will probably never see again.

One of the more interesting additions to the invasion narrative, that school of imagination which dreams a world of Britain conquered, invaded and changed, has been D C Alden's self-published book, Invasion. The interest lies in the confused concoction that forms a fictionalisation of the Eurabian nightmare, the creation of a West Islam. As the blurb indicates, the imagined consequences are radical:

Britain is no more, reduced to a mere satellite state at the far western fringes of the Arabian empire, a vast domain that stretches from the dark borders of Scotland to the Chinese frontier where war still rages. London is a walled city again, its war-damaged historical buildings demolished and replaced with bronze statues, marbled mosques and landscaped memorial gardens, all celebrating the overthrow of western civilization in Europe. The city is a hub of Islamic power, a power that enslaves the British people to a life of servitude and confines them to crumbling, weed-choked suburbs outside the city.

The author acknowledges in his foreword that the script was originally written for film, and the novelisation is kitted out for adaptation to the screen. We have all of the props of the disaster novel but not of the disaster movie: an ensemble caste, cut and paste following different characters, and no protagonist to focus upon. The rag-bag conceptualisation, the overwhelming infodumps, the lack of an editor (weighing in at 641 pages) detract from the interesting kernel of a better novel. Alden can write and he can probably write better than this.

The major problem of the novel is the lack of plausibility. Whereas the invasion narrative is described as the juxtaposition of an ideologically unified Islam, politically united in a militarised and jihadist Arabia following its imperialist path, invading a supine, decadent and pacifistic Europe, the development of such a power would have caused some geopolitical concern, and downplays the Shi'a Sunni division. The United States gains energy security through the use of alien technology from Roswell. Hence, the thriller enters the realm of the unreal.

Such implausibility may reflect the sources of this cultural anxiety, of which Eurabia is a political extension. If we consider the stories told about Islamic invasion, the two most recent examples stem from chiliastic Christian fundamentalism or representations of other prophecies such as Nostradamus. These have often pictured a united Islam invading Europe with the final Pope dying in France, fulfilling Malachy's prophecy, another fateful addition to the brew.

In the wake of Pakistan going nuclear in May, 1998, Muslim countries have, now, an easy access to the "Islamic Bomb". And the communist China’s support to Pakistan is no secret. Could it, therefore, be that China, and a group of Muslim countries would pact up to launch an attack on Europe the next year, some time before the month of July? According to quatrain 72, Century X, "the war shall reign before and after that month".

Mercifully, however, there is no mention of India to be involved in the nuclear conflagration, as per the prophecies of Nostradamus.

The political, the cultural and the prophetic representations of the Islamic invasion narrative all play a part in Alden's novel. No doubt, this will eventually become a more fruitful vein of fictional endeavour, as thriller writers respond to the changes taking place around them in Europe. Thankfully, the future is more complex, more fractured and more optimistic than Alden's take portrays.

The other day I pulled a couple of quotations from this book, which I mostly liked although it has some annoying parts too. What got me wondering is why so-called US "liberal" academics are capable of writing penetrating and thoughtful pieces on certain areas of life but also clearly dumb as stumps on economics. Take this passage from Professor Hanley on page 72 and 73 of the book, where he defends racial quotas in universities:

"Suppose that a white male applicant loses out on a college place to a black male applicant, even though his SAT score was higher... I think the sense of unfairness here springs instead from the intuition that since the white student didn't do anything wrong, and since his score was higher, he deserves the place ahead of the black student."

"To which I say, bullcrap."

This professor has a nice line in reasoned argument. Let's go on.

"This is once again simply ignoring structural discrimination, if it's not just plainly racist."

Define "structural discrimination", Professor. What is it? How can a person be discriminated against where no actual conscious human being has decided that Fred is going to get a fairer deal in a college admission than John? Structurual discrimination is a sort of catch-all expression that in fact simply says that over a long period of time, certain racial groups have underperformed in certain ways and that there might be factors that should be corrected. But for how long does the impact of this "structural discrimination" last? 10 years? 20? 100? What sort of empirical evidence does Prof. Hanley think will be needed to show that this is over and we can revert to the idea of treating people equally before the law, like those fuddy-duddies such as James Madison said should be the case? The Professor does not say, although he swears a lot and thinks that people who disagree with him are idiots. I guess he is so struck by his own moral grandeur that he cannot imagine anyone decent disagreeing. What a jerk.

He goes on:

"If we're granting that the white student is a beneficiary of structural discrimination, then we can't say that he is more deserving (of a college place). Desert is a matter of what you've done with what you've got. We have no prior reason to think that the white applicant has done more - so we have no reason to think that he has been unfairly done by."

So presumably the honest thing for such a professor would be to give up the pretence of holding SAT or other education tests at all. Why not say this: "White folk are beneficiaries of former discrimination in their favour, even if the folk today are not to be blamed for what their ancestors did. As a result, no matter whether the white college applicant is a clever, conscientious person, he or she should be wiling to let people from racial groups we think are the victims of ancestral discrimination take first place in the queue. And if you disagree with that judgement, then you are an evil person and quite possibly a Republican."

I take back what I said about this book and its author a day or so ago. He is not as smart or as funny as he first appeared (well, we all make mistakes). He is, in fact, a thug with a fancy academic title. Sadly, there are a lot of them.

Like a lot of people, I am a big fan of the cartoon show South Park, in which a group of characters send up the hypocrisies and stupidity of the world around them. The makers of the show seem to have a fairly strong libertarian streak although they themselves seem desperate - perhaps wisely - to avoid any explicit label. There is a good interview with them here. And the other day, on a pure whim, I bought this entertaining book, "South Park and Philosophy," a collection of essays mostly by Richard Hanley, who is a professor of philosophy in Delaware. Most of his essays are pretty smart and funny and I can recommend the book, although religiously inclined people would be appalled, I think, by Hanley's assumption that religious people are, by definition, crazy.

Hanley understands the bit about how South Park is often seen by its fans, and possibly even by its enemies, as pretty liberal in the old-fashioned, non-US usage of that word. He is quite nice to libertarians, actually, and even gives an accurate summary of the views of Robert Nozick, which is refreshing. No straw men here. However, Hanley goes on to attack libertarianism on the grounds that, such liberties as are defended are in fact a sort of nuisance. "Too much" choice is confusing and takes up a lot of time, time better spent having fun. Hanley, with the unusual and refreshing candour that is the mark of the book, argues that libertarianism is unappealing to people because many people want to remain like children and have the parents do the annoying and time-consuming decisions for them. Excerpt:

"A sure way to make your small child miserable is to put them in charge of the mintiae of life. Make them decide not just what to have for breakfast, or what to wear, but also what brand of toothpaste or underwear to buy, what to cook for dinner, and so on. Make them pay the bills for their stuff. They do not want to do all that crap. They just want to be kids, for Christ's sake. And part of being a kid is having someone else sweat the small stuff for you. Then you can go play, or play with yourself, or what it is that you want to do."

And in this respect, I want to be treated like a kid. I want universal health care, so I don't have to worry about falling ill, and being shit out of luck or coverage. I want gun control, so that I don't have to worry about protecting myself from a fucking nut job like Jimbo or Ned (whoever they are, Ed) when they want to shoot up the joint. I want social security,so that I don't have to know all the ins and outs of the fucking stock market....I want consumer protection, so I don't have to investigate every fucking product like I want to buy, the "sea monkeys" Cartman buys in "Simpsons Already Did It". I want state utilities, so I don't have to be constantly figuring out the best deal".....

He concludes, "What I am proposing is not so very radical."

No, it is not. What this academic with a foul mouth - presumably trying to show how hip and totally kewl he is - is a statist who has admitted that statists want life to be like childhood. They want the state to take care of the supposedly terrifying idea that we should make provision for our own old age rather than vote for high taxes and steal the money from other people and future, as yet unborn, generations. He finds it a shock that consumers' best defence is to read the label rather than have state officials regulate consumer products on our behalf (and how well has that worked?). He positively wets his pants in terror about investing in a fund on the stock market, despite the fact that millions of people, who are not even university professors with fancy letters after their names, find this to be a perfectly normal activity. In Victorian Britain, remember, millions of factory workers saved their precious spare money in mutual aid groups called Friendly Societies and even set them up themselves. Amazing. And his comment about guns wins the prize for most cretinous comment of the lot, since he presumably has not been reading up about the appalling spate of shootings of young British kids in London and elsewhere in a country that has tried the sort of gun control he favours.

Many years ago, I recall that the late Keith Joseph, the Conservative politician and confidente of Margaret Thatcher, likened the position of a person under socialism to that of an infant receiving pocket money from his mother. The state would take care of all the pesky stuff like pensions, education, health, housing, transport - pretty much anything serious - and leave a bit of spare cash so that the benighted citizen could gamble around, bet on the horses, take the odd holiday, but otherwise have the freedom of a child in a kindergarten. Joseph put the finger on the long-term cost of this paternalism: by infantilising people, it makes them vulnerable to problems in the long run. It means that people start to forget what it was ever like to have such choices and decisions in the first place.

There is another issue. When people moan that we are overwhelmed by "too many" choices - a question-begging notion if there ever was one - they assume that their own fear of choice must be shared by everyone else. I suppose there are some people who would rather not bother about providing for retirement, or worry about consumer safety. Well, in an open society with a division of labour, people with a dislike of risk can work in corporations for a fixed salary and have a lot of benefits given as part of the package. Other people, meanwhile, prefer to work as entrepreneurs with an uneven income and take more decisions for themselves. There are consumer magazines that check products out on our behalf as a commercial service, and in shopaholic nations like Britain, shopping itself seems to have become a sort of business in its own right. There are endless programmes and magazine articles about it. If a lot of people find certain choices difficult or frightening, then that is a business opportunity for someone else. And so on.

What Hanley wants, and what all such devotees of paternalism want, is for a lot of the messiness and complexity of modern life to be taken away by Big Government. Well, we have had more than a century of experimenting with such a notion, and such paternalism has been tested to destruction. The fraying state of civil society, with problems of rising crime, the "victim" culture, is much of the consequence. Professor Hanley does not want to grow up, and neither do many other people. At least he has had the honesty to admit that Big Government is the dream of toddlers.

Lastly, when thinking about paternalism, remember PJ O'Rourke's wise words: giving money and power to politicians is like giving whisky and a Porsche 911 to a 15-year-old.

I recommend the Institute of Economic Affairs latest publication, Patricia Morgan's 'The war between the State and the Family: How government divides and impoverishes'.

This is a work in the tradition of such writers as Charles Murray showing how the combination of various government benefits and schemes (rather than any one benefit) have helped undermine the traditional family and increased welfare dependency and poverty, both in Britain and in other countries.

One of the important elements of this little work is that it shows that many of the very people who denounce the increase in inequality (for whilst there has been no great increase in absolute poverty, as the income of a person on benefits today is at least as high as that of many working people in the 1940's, there has been an increase in inequality) in various Western nations have supported the policies that have undermined families and increased inequality.

Also the work shows how the targeting of the 'truly needy', something done by Conservative governments from the start of the 1980's onwards by, contrary to media reports, increasing government support for such people, had very bad consequences.

Many libertarians may be wary of someone like Patricia Morgan who clearly supports the old style family of wife looking after the children and husband bringing home the money: the dream of the Victorian working class which, by the end of the century, they had largely achieved, and this suspicion may be increased by Dr Morgan's support for favourable treatment of the traditional family by the tax system; which was something that was only important in a few decades after the World War II - as before the war the majority of families did not pay income tax. But her arguments should not be dismissed out of hand simply because she is a "reactionary".

Patricia Morgan argues that what has happened over the last few decades in Britain and some other nations (the vast increased in the percentage of births out of wedlock, the growth in one parent households, and the vast growth of dependency on money from the government) is not some 'natural' example of 'social evolution', but has been driven by government policies - policies of governments of parties of both "left" and "right".

Certainly Dr Morgan may be attacked for implying that everything was O.K. with the family before the state became involved (as I have stated above the situation where the vast majority of families earned a decent income and were free of government support and abject poverty was an achievement of economic and social development over the Victorian period, it was not always so).

Also Patricia Morgan can be attacked for a Chicago school style 'economic man' approach where human beings react to monetary incentives almost (although not quite) to the exclusion of other factors.

However, one does not have to believe that the growth in government support has caused all the negative developments, in Britain and other lands, over the last few decades to believe that it has helped cause them.

With the advance of technology and economic development over the last few decades families should be stronger and poverty should be much less. Just as family life was vastly better in 1901 than it had been in, for example, 1837. Yet who would argue that families are stronger now than they were in say 1960?

Also the changes in behaviour (not just in Britain, but in such nations as the United States, Australia and New Zealand) can often be dated back to the specific years in which there were changes in the benefit structure, and (in the case of the United States) certain changes in benefit structure can be argued to have achieved the 'impossible' task of, in certain respects, turning the clock back.

Whilst this does not prove Patricia Morgan's case beyond all doubt, it does mean that the case of this lady is worth a look.

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
Tom Holland
First published in the UK by Little Brown 2005 – Abacus paperback 2006

I first encountered Tom Holland by reading his previous non-fiction work, Rubicon, about the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, which I wrote about here enthusiastically in June of this year. About Persian Fire - which is about the titanic struggle between the Greeks and the Persian Empire of Darius and then of his son Xerxes (Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis etc.) - I am, if possible, even more enthusiastic. The same virtues are present in this book as in Rubicon: narrative grip, convincing analysis, and a story of overwhelming importance to anyone who wants to understand the world he lives in and how it got to be that way. This is a story I desperately wanted to learn about much more thoroughly than my patchy reading in ancient history had previously told me, and Persian Fire made it extremely easy for me to do just that.

A standard rave review meme is that this superb book screwed up the reviewer's everyday life, sleep patterns, holiday plans, etc., and if my experience is anything to go by Persian Fire triumphantly passes this test. I had all kinds of plans for this autumn, and they were severely deranged, given what a slow reader I am. The reading of other very good books was set aside. Big writing plans were postponed yet again. My living room remains the mess it was four months ago. And then even when I had finished reading Persian Fire I found that I did not then want to do, read or even think about anything much else, because I wanted to make sure that I had done my Samizdata review of it before it began to fade from the memory. So, if you read no further of this, read that this is one splendid book.

What people like Paul Marks or Sean Gabb would make of it, people who know this story inside out already, I do not know. I suspect that they would be impressed if slightly bored, and that they would nitpick details of interpretation but have no big complaints. But I am, I surmise, a more typical sort of educated person than those two luminaries, the sort who knows lots of bits and pieces about stories like this but nothing like as much as I'd like to. And I absolutely loved it.

One of the many things I like about this book is that you get both the story from the Persian end, and the same story as experienced by the Greeks. Holland starts in Persia, with the formation of the Persian Empire by Cyrus, followed by confusion involving his sons Cambyses and Bardiya, confusion ended by the upwardly mobile Darius in 522BC.

During the very early pages of this book I did wonder how much of what I was reading was true and how much mere speculation, but in defence of Holland, he writes in a way that makes clear how sketchy the historical record is of those places and times. Great Kings like Cyrus and Darius lived in a place and at a time when (a) history was the history of the Great King, not of any distinct thoughts or actions of the riff raff they ruled, and (b) in which a routine method of celebrating a military victory was not just completely to massacre your defeated opponents but also to expunge everything they had ever said or done from the record of history, to make them as if they had never been. Which makes things hard for later historians.

Nevertheless, a convincing picture does emerge. I particularly liked the regular references to "Ahura Mazda" - the Persian version of God Almighty - and of the intimate relationship between Ahura Mazda and the Great King, their wishes and plans for the world being pretty much the same thing.

The "King of Kings" title is interesting. The point was that the Great Kings, Cyrus, Darius, Xerxes and the rest of them, although they would sometimes expunge entire cultures and peoples, would more typically install themselves at the top of traditional local hierarchies, rather as if a future conqueror of Europe were to announce that he was the President of France, Germany, Italy etc., the King of England, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and so on. The jobs and their associated hierarchies remained in place. It was just that the top jobs were now held by the new man, the President of Presidents, as it were.

Philosophically, if it makes any sense to use such a word about such crushingly simple arrangements, groveling obedience to the King of Kings was not just a matter of political correctness, for without such obedience the very fabric of the universe was in jeopardy. Nature, the world, the very stars in their tracks, all depended upon the smooth running of the Empire, and on everyone doing as they were told, by Ahura Mazda as interpreted by the King of Kings. So, if thousands of wretched innocents had to be massacred, or if a hitherto trusted subordinate had to be sacrificed, this was not mere political expediency; it was doing the necessary to keep Heaven and Earth all in its proper place and correct alignment. No distinction could be made, in such a world, between What Is True, and What The King of Kings Says, argument with which is impossible. Doubt it and die. All else is The Lie. All were slaves of Ahura Mazda, and of the King of Kings.

Not that there were not rebellions of course . . . and there goes another minor quibble I have about this book, which is the somewhat excessive use of the "Not that . . .", often followed by a further negative, to begin a paragraph that corrects an implied absolute offered in the previous paragraph. This gets a bit annoying.

Not that . . . I want to criticise too strongly, because this verbal tick is but an offshoot of the fact that Holland is so determined to keep his narrative thread in one piece. As I say, Holland held my attention throughout this book, and if that means the occasional rather obtrusive verbal knotting of the thread, then that is a price I am happy to pay.

As for his general writing style, well, let's just say that although Holland turns out to be the same age as me, he goes out of his way to sound as if he is a bit younger, and about the same age as Tony Blair. Again, I am happy to pay this price, and greatly prefer this manner of writing to that of an earlier age of classical popularisers, whose assumptions, preoccupations and stylistic quirks were very different to what works best now. I think the difference between the way we now think about potentates, and the way they were thought about in, say, 1950, is that now, we are all rather more cynical, and less inclined to accept the elevated position of these people as a simple given. We are thus more intrigued by their . . . intrigues. How did they get their power? How did they keep it? How did they finance it? We also want to know more of the gruesome details of how battles were fought, perhaps because most of us have fought fewer actual battles ourselves, and don't need as much of a rest from that kind of thing as our fathers and grandfathers did. But those are guesses, and maybe say more about how different I am from the tot I was in the 1950s than how educated people thought in those days compared to now.

Anyway, having got it established, Darius expands his empire in all directions, including in a westerly direction, and . . . enter the Greeks!

Persian Fire provides the best short account of the ancient Greeks – who they were, how they lived, what they valued and how they fought – that I have ever read. In particular, it provided me with a much clearer grip on the chronology of it all.

Most of the accounts of these times that I have read in the past have concentrated only on this or that aspect of the story, such as the emergence of Athenian democracy, how the Greeks fought, what happened when the Persians attacked, and in particular, this or that battle (notably Salamis). Holland, for me, tied it all together.

The emergence of Athenian democracy coincided precisely with the moment when the Athenians (a) united themselves, and (b) became a military force to be reckoned with. The phalanx that won so amazingly for them at Marathon was the direct result of the esprit de corps that their newly emancipated political status had given birth to. We're all part of this! Even the Spartans, who did nothing but fight, and who famously presided (this I did know) over a brutally downtrodden slave class who did all the mere work, had their own elaborate rules about citizenship and kingship, etc., and your average Spartan warrior felt very much part of things. He was an engaged citizen, pumped full of ideological enthusiasm, rather than a mere serf. As for the Athenians, they all now had rights - well, every male citizen did - to property, to political participation and voting, to say what the hell they liked and to live however they liked. These were new ideas, never before seen in the world. And it turned out that people animated by these rights and liberties were better at fighting than the kind who were merely ordered into battle like cattle. The newly emerging Athenian democracy was quickly tested in battle in a typical local spat between them and the Thebans. Were Athenian farmer/hoplites willing to fight shoulder to shoulder for what they might feel, in the heat of battle, to be mere abstractions? Yes they were! The Thebans were smashed! (506BC)

Heavily dependent as Holland is on the few writers of that time, he only very rarely indulges in chunks of the especially important Herodotus, in great big typographically distinct gobs. But, following the Athenian triumph over Thebes, he does thus indulge, and so will I:

And so it was that the Athenians found themselves suddenly a great power. Not just in one field, but in everything that they set their minds to, they gave vivid proof of what equality and freedom of speech might achieve. As the subjects of a tyrant, what had they accomplished? Nothing exceptional, to be sure. With the tyrant gone, however, they had suddenly become the best fighters in the world. Held down like slaves, they had shirked and slacked; once they had won their freedom, not a citizen but he could feel that he was labouring for himself. [pp. 138-9]

In our present world, the kind of people who obsess about human rights tend also to be very concerned about what makes for peace, or in my case, for peace and trade, rather than effectiveness and honour on the battlefield, and this is especially the case in Europe. Accordingly, the way that political emancipation and military effectiveness went hand in hand in ancient Greece, although of course fundamental to the emergence of freedom-and-democracy (because battlefield prowess ensured that these institutions were able to survive), is not much talked about these days. In our time, freedom-and-democracy have enabled great wealth, in contrast to the Persian methods of our time, which have lead only to mass impoverishment, and as a result the greatest recent military confrontation of our time, the Cold War, was won by the side with the deepest pockets and the fattest cheque books. Oh, there was military spirit aplenty on our side, but central to the victory of civilisation against our Persians was that we could pay for scary hi-tech weapons and eventually, they couldn't. Civilisation won the Cold War in the same spirit that it simultaneously equipped itself with colour TVs and microwave ovens. It paid the relevant specialists and gave them the tools they needed. But the Greeks didn't outsource their fighting, even if the Spartans outsourced all their mere work. They themselves fought, and got to be very good at it, what with all that practicing they did on each other. They brought the same inventiveness and cooperative spirit to fighting that our civilisation applies to such things as the making of computer chips and writing of computer software.

And the Persians only began to work out what had hit them when it was too late.

As far as they were concerned, the Greeks were an insignificant mob of quarrelling anarchists, clearly rotten with The Lie. The western coast of what is now Turkey was conquered, and a small expeditionary force was sent to crush what remained of these tiresome people, in places like Athens and Sparta. And, at the Battle of Marathon (490 BC) the Athenians give this relatively small force, but still a huge force compared to them, an amazing thrashing.

Because of the detailed way in which the Greeks had worked out how to fight in large and heavily armed teams rather than as just a mob of lightly armed individual warriors, they were, man for man, just plain better than the Persians. But the Persians, especially once Xerxes had, a decade after the Marathon setback, decided to take the expunging of these annoying little places seriously, had enormous - mind-bogglingly enormous - numerical superiority.

Two things took the force out of the sheer weight of numbers that the Persians then, under Xerxes, brought to bear on the Greeks. First, their huge army had to be fed. Even slaves have to eat. And this turned out to mean that any more than mild delays, even if concluded victoriously, could be very serious. As soon as the Greeks proved themselves to be more than a pushover, Xerxes was always fighting not only the Greeks, but time. Thus it was that Thermopylae (480 BC), where a mere three hundred Spartans famously impeded the Great King's army for about a week, cost Xerxes not only untold thousands of dead, whom he could easily spare, but time that he could not. Pressed for time, Xerxes found himself obliged to attack, just as at Thermopylae, in places chosen by the Greeks, which basically meant narrow fronts where Persian numbers wouldn't count, and where Greek man-for-man superiority did.

Soon after, at Salamis, the Athenians, having abandoned Athens to their enemy, defended, with the fleet that they had hastily constructed, a narrow straight against a vastly more numerous Persian fleet. Could the Athenians demonstrate the same front line - this time ship-for-ship - superiority that they had already achieved at Marathon and that the Spartans had so heroically displayed at Thermopylae? Yes they could! In what remains the biggest sea battle ever fought in all of human history, forty thousand of King Xerxes's slaves perished, mostly by drowning.

Which, of course, was everyone's fault except the Great King's. Heads rolled, literally.

He abandoned Greece, leaving a relatively small force behind to do the necessary, under the command of Mardonius, upon which the Greeks inflicted yet another spectacular defeat, at Plataea (479 BC). It was one of those battles that was settled with one blow, the blow being from a rock that somebody chucked at Mardonius. It hit him on the head, and, the Persian soldiers being slaves who were utterly dependent upon their leader, with Mardonius died a huge number of Persian soldiers, and what turned out to be the the last Persian hope of subjugating what we now call Ancient Greece. Thus were the Ancient Greeks able to press on with constructing the political and cultural foundations upon which we still live. By the time they did what victorious coalitions so often do, namely descend into ruinous civil war, thereby doing to themselves what the Persians had failed to do to them, the opposite of the damage, so to speak, had been done. Western Civilisation was well and truly on its way.

I have offered a severely truncated summary of the story that Holland tells, in all its gore and glory, for two reasons. First, sadly, not everybody who reads this review will now buy this book and read it right through, even though almost everybody should (if they have not done so already). To all those busy workers, peasants and intellectuals, who, by way of classical learning, only ever read bleeding chunks of this story, such as I have just told, well, at least you have learned something.

But second, when you review a really good work of history about which you are extremely enthusiastic, you automatically find yourself summarising the story yourself. You cannot help yourself. And about this book I am very enthusiastic indeed.

Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic
Tom Holland
Little, Brown, 2003

One of the great joys of my teenage years was hearing, with titles and composers attached, the very same classical music core repertoire that I had first been exposed to in my infancy. So that's what that is, I would cry out with joy, as yet another familiar tune would finally identify itself as whichever overture or symphony or concerto it was. Lost chord after lost chord, found.

Reading Tom Holland's Rubicon has been a similarly joyous experience.

After my infancy of listening to the BBC Third Programme, there followed an expensive education during which I absorbed only bits and pieces of what was being said. I emerged from this education with a fairly thorough understanding of the Bible and its various contents, even as I became ever more unconvinced by its claims. Geography and post-1066 English history were a solid enough basis for further reading and learning. But when it came to the ancient world, the pieces of the puzzle were too few to join up, the fragments of the picture too closely associated with the grind of being made to learn Latin and Greek, which for me never really got beyond word games. I recall being awarded ninety eight percent for a "Latin verse" exam. Even then, I knew that my achievement, such as it was, had nothing to do with poetry. As far as ancient Roman history was concerned, most of what I emerged with from my Latin lessons was a jumble of mysterious names, such as Labienus, Cotta, Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Mithridates. Much was made in my Latin lessons of Rome's subjugation of Britain, but only a vague version even of that really stuck.

At some point I acquainted myself with an approximation of the Hannibal story, with its epic crossing of the Alps, its equally amazing massacres of various legions at Lake Trasimene and at Cannae (216BC), and later Hannibal's defeat, in 202BC at Zama, which was the one where Scipio Africanus left gaps in his line for Hannibal's elephants to charge uselessly through.

Later on, further pieces of the puzzle landed on the still largely empty table. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for instance, and then Anthony and Cleopatra. I devoured Robert Graves's I Claudius and Claudius The God, but mostly because of the evil Messalina's exploits and because of all the gladiatorial gore. Not that long ago, I finally watched the movie Spartacus all the way through. More recently, I got hooked on Rome, the recent TV soap opera. But I missed the beginning of that, and was never really sure where the boundary was there between fact and fiction. (Verenius? Pullo? Still don't know about them.) But it was still only bits and pieces. More big names had piled up in my head, like Crassus (Laurence Olivier in Spartacus), and I now knew rather more about Pompey (Kenneth Cranham in Rome). But I only caught these personages in the middles and ends of their careers. Given that Pompey's career ended in defeat at the hands of Caesar, how did he get to be called Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great?

For me, the joy of reading Rubicon is that the blanks have at last been filled in. Joy may seem an odd word to describe reading about events which involved so much suffering and disaster, both to Romans and to their enemies. But now that it has all happened, we might as well enjoy it. It would have been no fun to have been in a legion at Carrhae (53BC), say, where the career of Crassus came to its abrupt and appalling end, but me having a grand old time learning about it all isn't going to make things any worse for anybody. And I really did enjoy this story. At no point while reading it was I ever bored or tempted to skip things. Seriously, it has been a long time since I have read a book with such rapt attention to what it was saying, with so little attention to what page number I had reached, and with such genuine disappointment when it stopped.

After an approximate history of Rome from the year dot (dot for the Romans being 753BC by our reckoning), Holland gets seriously stuck into the story at around the time of the final destruction of Carthage (146 BC). He ends with the triumph of Octavian, who became Augustus in 27BC and consolidated his power in the few years after then. So, not much about Hannibal, and nothing at all about lost legions in Germany.

Holland uses our Christian dating system rather than the Roman one of the time, which makes sense, for us. But I would have liked occasional references to what date the Romans thought it was, given that they could not themselves prophecy the date of Christ's birth and work backwards, fond though they were of prophecies. There are occasional references to decades like the "fifties". But since presumably the Romans talked about their own recent decades with their own dates, much as we talk about our recent decades, I would have liked occasional references to the Roman way with dates, even if it might have confused me.

I could probably think of other quibbles if I really worked at it, but the truth is that I come not to bury this book but to praise it, and judging by all the adulatory reviews attached to the beginning of it I'm not the only one, which reassures me that it is probably good history as well as just good writing.

A lot of the fun of this book is that Tom Holland uses the skills of a novelist to get you inside the heads of his many characters. He continually switches point of view, at one moment telling you how things seemed to whichever big shot he is talking about, and the next moment telling you how it all seemed to that big shot's contemporaries. In manner he is almost identical to another fine historian and populariser of recent years, Simon Schama. Indeed, I quite often found myself reading this book with Schama's voice in my head, what with Schama having done lots of history on the telly, but Holland's voice being, for me, unknown. I shouldn't be surprised to encounter Holland on the telivision in the future.

Holland says that if Schama hadn't already taken the title Citizens (for his book about the French Revolution), he would have called his book that.

There are all sorts of things about ancient Rome which I now understand a whole lot better.

I understand Roman marriage customs better. I knew, or maybe I just assumed, that Roman grandees married for reasons of political calculation, to firm up a political alliance. But what I had not appreciated was that they would divorce for similar reasons. When one alliance had served its purpose, and another one was required with someone different, the old wife would be dispensed with and a new one acquired. In such a world, a woman was liable to remain a lot closer to her father, and to her original family generally. Marriage was liable to be temporary but a blood tie was permanent. The great love of Cicero's life, for instance, apart from the Roman Republic itself, was his daughter Tullia, who died, from the complications of childbirth (the female equivalent of dying in battle), just before he himself was assassinated (43BC).

Cicero had been just a name to me, until now. "Did Cicero speak?" "Aye Cicero spoke. Greek." (Julius Caesar). But who was he? Why did he matter? Holland's description of the immense importance of legal proceedings, and of the people who could sway them with their oratory, made this a lot clearer. Law court proceedings were as vitally important and as unpredictable and fraught with duplicity as was warfare itself, and Cicero was, simply, the finest law court stroke political orator of his generation. When he talked, people listened. This was a man who could ruin your entire career with one well aimed speech.

Another similarly elusive figure for me, until now, was Cato. Obviously an important and worthy chap, or why would these guys name themselves after him? But again, who was he, and why did he matter? Well, I won't bore you with my summary of the answer. Suffice it to say that Holland did not bore me at all with his.

The bit of the Roman story that I learned most about that was new to me was happenings in what we now called the Middle East. Mithridates was for many years a huge thorn in that particular Roman side, until one of those admirable but lesser known Romans, the sort who was better at doing things than at getting the credit for it, by the name of Lucullus, got stuck into Mithridates. With an army that a smug opponent said was "too big to be an embassy but too small to be an army", Lucullus nevertheless won a great victory over Mithridates, at Tigranocerta (69BC). Maybe you've heard of that one, but it was completely new to me.

Then Pompey showed up in the East, doing something his contemporaries apparently often accused him of doing, which was to skim off the credit after another Roman had done most of the serious hard work, what Americans now call the "heavy lifting". Pompey subjugated the Far East for Rome, or at any rates persuaded Rome that he was responsible for this. Hence the Magnus in his name.

Pompey apparently did the same to Crassus, after Crassus had all but destroyed the great slave revolt lead by Spartacus. A few of the slaves fled north, nearer to Rome, from defeat in the South of Italy by Crassus (71BC). These survivors did not, by the way, include Spartacus himself. He, unlike Kirk Douglas in the movie, died in that last big battle. But Pompey mopped up the last survivors of the revolt and cleaned up on the credit.

What I got from reading Holland's book was a sense, at last, of how these mighty potentates – Pompey, Crassus, Julius Caesar of course – got started out as potentates. In Republican Rome there was really no line to be drawn between politics and entrepreneurship, a state of affairs captured beautifully by something Crassus apparently said, that you couldn't be considered rich until you could afford to support an army out of your income. You got started by being born into one of those aristocratic clans. You ran for high political office, and won. And then you speculated, and accumulated. You financed military adventures, and then, if all went well, you profited from them.

Julius Caesar did very well in Gaul, but it is interesting how the story played out. Caesar conquered Gaul. Hurrah! Gaul then united, and rose up in revolt. It was a quagmire! But, the Romans rather liked quagmires, because they were a chance to slaughter more foreigners and win more glory, which Caesar duly did. Which I sort of knew. What I did not know was the importance of drugs to the Gallic War. Wine, to be exact. The Romans made it. The Gauls loved it. And the Gauls used to sell one another into Roman slavery to finance their habit. I'm guessing that the Gauls were well aware of the strategic importance of their weakness, and of how it may even have cost them their liberty. Is it too fanciful to see in this story the origins of the modern French fascination with wine? Whatever the truth of that speculation, Caesar did very nicely for himself in Gaul. If, on the other hand, things went badly . . .

Crassus, the great nearly man of those times, although fabulously rich, never quite made it. He lunged for glory in the East, and got himself and his army destroyed at Carrhae. Before he died that day, he had to endure seeing his own son's head paraded in front of him and his doomed army.

The Romans, until Augustus took command, prided themselves on never being ruled by one unchallengeable tyrant, this having been precisely the sentiment that the triumphant Julius Caesar had fallen foul of . (Caesar was killed 44BC.) The moment in their history, way back, when their King had been sent packing was a major part of their history and their self-image. And here lies another fascinating insight not just into Roman history but into history as such. The Romans, bossy and bloodthirsty though they were, spent a long, long time lording it over the lesser breeds while telling them that the difference between Rome and them was that Rome had no king. The Romans were citizens.

So, if you wanted to wind the Romans up, what did you do? That's right, you called yourself a king. Mithridates, who became king of Pontus in 112BC, did it on a grand scale, and was the man who really got this idea going. Even pirate leaders called themselves kings. (Pompey flushed all the pirates out of the Mediterranean in 67BC.) Monarchy as revolution! This is not a notion that makes much sense to us, and until I read this book, such an idea had never even occurred to me. The Middle East being what it is, the political fantasies of that part of the world became suffused with ideas concerning this or that Great King, who would deliver the downtrodden from their downtroddenness, and generally give the Romans a good sorting out. This makes sense of much concerning Christianity that had hitherto not done so. King of the Jews? What was that about? Well, that was the kind of notion you naturally resorted to, if you were up against the Romans.

Meanwhile, the Romans in due course found themselves being ruled by an "Emperor", a king in all but title.

While Rome was a small state in central Italy, the system of competitive political entrepreneurship served them well, extraordinarily well. The various players of the Great Game all knew that, ultimately, they were all on the same side. They all, in the end, pulled together. But once Rome started to rule Spain, and North Africa, and then the East, things flew apart and the centre couldn't hold. Unless, they finally found themselves being told, the centre was all run by the one big boss.

Rome had no natural boundary between itself and its various colonial possessions, the way the Britain later did. For Rome, there were only such lines on the map as the Rubicon, the little river which was so small that nobody now knows where it is, which Caesar crossed with his army (49BC). This was breaking all the rules of Republican Rome, and it brought colonial power into the heart of the Roman political system. It was as if the Indian Army had entered Britain by nipping across the Channel.

I could go on, and on. I haven't even mentioned, for instance, Queen Cleopatra (died 30BC). I hope I have made it clear that whereas I am in a position to enthuse about this book, I am in no position to judge its accuracy, to judge whether the lines dividing the established and proven, the plausible, and the merely speculative, are ever crossed without these boundaries being properly flagged up. I am, as already stated above, no classical scholar, and it was a relief to me that I was not expected to know any Latin. After reading this book, I immediately tried to read also that classic work of an earlier time, dealing with similar events, Ronald Syme's The Roman Revolution. But with that book, written just before World War Two and published just after it, you are expected to know Latin. Worse, Syme's book exudes the clear implication that all educated people already know most of this stuff, and that any book about such things was adding knowledge and subtleties of judgement to a mass of things that the reader already knew. So instead, I have been keeping my remainder shop eyes open (I bought Rubicon itself in such a shop for £3.99) for other more modern, post-Beatles, post-Latin-in-schools books about the Roman Empire, to learn more. The whole point of a work of popularisation like Rubicon is to make you want to dig deeper. That was certainly the effect it had on me.

So, although it probably wouldn't do for Paul Marks: highly recommended.

I could, however, find no mention of Labienus, so about him I am still none the wiser. Was he perhaps one of Caesar's lieutenants. Paul?

Men of Honour: Trafalgar and the Making of the English Hero
Adam Nicolson
HarperCollins, 2005

The Campaign of Trafalgar
Julian S. Corbett
Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2005

Admiral Collingwood, Nelson's own hero
Max Adams
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005

Wellington's Navy: Sea Power and the Peninsular War, 1807-1814
Christopher D. Hall
Chatham Publishing, 2004

Start with a howler

It must be rare for a reader on opening a book to encounter a howler in line one, page one (to be pedantic, of the first Preface page, p. xiii), of a historical work, but Adam Nicolson has managed it: "More Catholics were burned at the stake in 16th century England than in any other country in Europe." After wondering where on earth such data could have come from, I realised, as every schoolboy used to know, that it was Protestants that got burned at the stake in England, whereas this never happened to Catholics anywhere in Europe at any time. Foxe, in his Book of Martyrs, gives 300 Protestants as suffering this fate mostly under Mary Tudor, while J.A. Froude in his classic work The Reign of Mary Tudor , estimates the numbers as between 270 and 290.

Continue with some errors...

But worse is to come. To continue this criticism: Nicolson gives this as an instance of the unusual "scale of aggression" manifested by the English from that time to the Napoleonic Wars, aggression which Nelson could call upon to win at Trafalgar. But here the facts contradict this claim. Mary Tudor was entirely responsible for this persecution, though she found enough fanatics to carry it out. Her advisers - even her husband, who became Philip II of Spain, and the ambassador of his father, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V - were against it. In many cases, sympathetic crowds came to witness the steadfastness of the victims. To complete the picture, Mary steadily ran down England's defences, spending her income on refurbishing churches and restoring monasteries, a policy culminating in the loss of Calais, England's last foothold on the European continent.

This particular error is all the more deplorable in a historian who has written a very competent account of the genesis of the Authorised Version of the Bible, Power and Glory, Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible which was completed in 1611, hardly far from the period of Mary's reign, 1553-1558.

The same misinterpretation of events occurs in the author's throwaway and sourceless line, "A higher percentage of the population died in the English Civil War than in the French Revolution." Though the English Civil War can be dated as 1642-1649, no termination date is given for the French Revolution, which after 1792 continued seamlessly for nearly the next quarter century in a series of European wars which cost France itself, according to La Fayette, in his impassioned address to the French Assembly, convened after Waterloo, three million lives and many more in the rest of Europe. Nor does Nicolson take into account the reluctance with which the English Civil War was inaugurated, with the parliamentarians, all from the same class, formerly united in their resistance to the King, now forced to pick sides when he decided to enforce his will to become an absolute monarch, like others across the Channel. Nor was the general population in any way inflamed - far from it.

Even after the war was well under way, a parliamentary general could write to his opposite number:

Certainly my affections are so unchangeable, that hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person... The God of peace in his own good time send us peace, and in the mean time fit us to receive it. We are both upon the stage, and must act those parts that are assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities.

The start and finish of a letter from Sir William Waller (Parliamentarian) to Sir Ralph Hopton (Royalist), quoted by Richard Ollard in This War Without an Enemy, a phrase he takes from the same letter.

Nicolson's citing of the subjugation of the Highlands after the Fortyfive is also inappropriate. By this time England had not experienced any military activity on its soil for nearly a century, its citizenry were effectively disarmed and its reaction to the incursion of Charles Edward Stuart was essentially passive and very few English Jacobites joined him.

Thus the case for some sort of latent English aggressiveness falls apart on examination. Even the tactic of "breaking the enemy's line" and provoking a melee with close ship to ship encounters became a Royal Navy tactic only in the second half of the eighteenth century. It was not invented by Nelson, but, as Nicolson states, initiated by Rodney and developed by Howe.

This policy can hardly be attributed to aggressiveness but rather to the fact that Royal Navy ships had become superior to the French in manoeuvrability and gunnery. Once engaged, a higher rate of broadside firing inevitably told and by Trafalgar they could deliver between two to three broadsides for every one of the French or Spanish. Aware of this, the British seamen sailed confidently to the attack.

Why was the battle fought?

It was emphatically not fought to save Britain from imminent invasion. Before proceeding any further with a discussion of the battle, it may be helpful to make it clear why it was fought where it was. Napoleon had cancelled the whole project nearly two months before and on the very day of Trafalgar was receiving the surrender of 27,000 Austrians at Ulm, deep in Germany, in Bavaria. Having abandoned the invasion, his instructions to Villaneuve, now in Cadiz, and commander of the Franco-Spanish fleet, were to proceed into the Mediterranean. Villeneuve started to do so, but, becoming aware of a British fleet intent on forcing a battle, reversed course, so that he could return to Cadiz, whether victor or loser. This manoeuvre, which took time and caused some disorder in his line of battle, brought him as far as Cape Trafalgar, some 30 miles south-west of Cadiz.

Collingwood, in Royal Sovereign, was the first to breach the somewhat disorderly enemy line and, though by the end of the action his ship was reduced to a dismasted, unsteerable near wreck by the attentions of five enemy ships before his support could come up and deal with them, suffered only 47 killed. Victory, left in much the same state, had 57, the highest in the whole fleet, including, of course, Nelson himself. Other ships had lower - mostly much lower - numbers killed. The total killed in the British fleet is given as 449; by contrast, those killed in the Franco-Spanish was over 5,000, over ten times as many.

Nicolson gives no figures: for these we must go to Max Adams' Admiral Collingwood. Likewise, we must go to Navies of the Napoleonic Era by Otto von Pivka (or some other source) to discover as well the manning levels of these ships. The largest, such as Royal Sovereign and Victory, with 100 guns, should have had between 850 and 875 men on board. Thus, in Victory, less than 7 in every hundred were actually killed, a fact not made clear in Nicolson's sanguinary account.

Readers must be warned that a description of the battle itself does not begin until page 209, with perhaps an overemphasis on the carnage involved. Following it, Nicolson gives a superb account of its aftermath, when Collingwood struggled to bring his own damaged fleet, together with seventeen French and Spanish captures, to safety in Gibraltar against the fearsome gale that blew straight towards the shore. He had to abandon most of the captured French and Spanish ships (valuable as prizes). This meant he had not only to take off the British prize crews, but also chose to evacuate as many of the enemy survivors as he could, including the wounded. The heroic attempts, largely successful, to rescue these last, are graphically described. But Nicolson does not explain how these compassionate activities are compatible with his hypothesis of "English aggressiveness".

Naval hierarchy, the "Honour" system and ambition;

Nicolson is on firmer ground as he analyses the ethos of the Royal Navy at the time, a mixture of rigid hierarchy, influence (in contemporary parlance "interest", a sort of super-old-boys' network), and opportunity: there was a ladder in place from bottom to top, from midshipman to admiral. The most difficult step was the middle one, from lieutenant to captain and here a favoured lieutenant could be greatly helped by his captain, especially on a station with a heavy mortality. Both Nelson and Collingwood gained their promotion this way, at the same time, in the West Indies, a notoriously disease-ridden environment.

All officers were "gentlemen" and bound together by a common code of "Honour", of which courage was of course an indispensable component, but supplemented by others, such as the etiquette of the hierarchy, deviation from which was fatal. St Vincent compared it "to the chastity of a woman and when once wounded may never be recovered." In the obverse of patronage, a captain could ruin a lieutenant after very little provocation. The French and Spanish also had their code of Honour, but it was more resigned and fatalistic (as they had cause to be). A heroic defeat was personally as creditable as a victory, not at all the right attitude to take when going into battle.

Coexisting with this system and to a large extent dependant on it was ambition, and its practical manifestation, the attainment of riches. The source for these was captured enemy ships, prizes. Such ships would be bought by the Admiralty, repaired and incorporated into the Royal Navy, often retaining the same name as a taunt to the enemy, who did it as well. Many French ships were, by common consent, better designed and built than Royal Navy ones. For some reason Pivka (op.cit.) gives the captures by the Royal Navy from 1792-99 only: 345, of which 60 were "ships of the line" of 74 guns or over, regarded as capable of participating with their equals in a set-piece battle.

Prize money distribution was greatly skewed towards the officer class and at the top end even more so. A captain could, after a few cruises to pick up merchantmen and privateers, buy a country house and move into the gentry class, if he wasn't in it already. To get such a plum job needed, apart from enterprise and energy, assignment by the Admiral on station, who would get his share, and influence back home could help a lot. Captain Fremantle is given as an extended example of this process, a rather unpleasant character, whose letter to his wife after Trafalgar expressed his sorrow for the death of Nelson, as a patron rather than as a friend.

All the above, of course, Nicolson applies to officers only: his attitude to the seamen who comprised the majority on board is confused. Rather sweepingly he states they could not be "gentlemen" and "Honour" was a concept unknown to them. The social gap was enormous, and almost unbridgeable, authority above them at best paternalistic. What of the heroism? What of the eagerness of going into battle (prize money would be minuscule)? These are insufficiently explained by the premises above.

Some omissions

What else does Nicolson leave out of this interesting but rambling book? He gives an adequate account on how difficult it was for the French to obtain materials to build their ships and how the revolutionary ethos after 1792 played havoc with their manning, but omits what was probably their greatest disadvantage, their inability to train their officers and seamen in the tasks that must be performed out at sea. The blockade kept up by the Royal Navy made it difficult for a fleet to emerge from their ports, the more so as these were subjected to the prevailing, often stormy southwest wind which incidentally made it easier for British ships to leave the ports on the south coast of England. The French commander, Villeneuve made the point himself: "They [i.e., the Royal Navy] have kept the seas without intermission since 1793, while most of [our] fleet have scarcely weighed anchor for eight years."

Nicolson's casual reference to our blockade as being carried out by "scurvy-ridden" ships must also be corrected. The anti-scorbutic properties of citrus fruits in particular were at last becoming well-known (if not understood) and, as Kenneth J. Carpenter states in his History of Scurvy and Vitamin C:

There seems no doubt that the issue of lemon juice, perhaps combined with other improvements in victualling, resulted in the elimination of scurvy from the British navy and, by increasing the time which ships could remain at sea, greatly increased its efficiency during the Napoleonic Wars... so the problem of scurvy in the British navy was solved just in time to maintain the resistance to Napoleon through the continental blockade, whereas the French Services were less fortunate.

Indeed they were "less fortunate". It was the French fleet that was "scurvy-ridden". A French Admiral who visited a Royal Navy establishment after the American War of Independence was introduced to the lemon or lime juice cure for scurvy, but did nothing about investigating it for use. By contrast, Carpenter tells us that "Over the period from 1795 to 1814, the Admiralty records show a total issue of 1.6 million gallons of lemon juice."

Nicolson might also have spared a few pages examining other strands of British society. In his Reminiscences, Captain Gronow gives us a picture of a section of it which, to put it bluntly, most felt no responsibility, or even interest, whatever in the war (though Gronow himself fought at Waterloo). And what of the Army and its ethos? It is easy to see which, soldier or sailor, entailed the greater battle-risk. At the battle of Salamanca in 1812, about one in ten of Wellington's army (British, Portuguese and Spanish) was killed. Figures of the total manning the British fleet at Trafalgar are hard to come by - Nicolson speaks of 47,000 participating in the battle, and the Franco-Spanish fleet seem to have had slightly superior numbers. Taking all ships of the line (74 guns or more) into account, the chances of British participants being killed were about one in fifty. For something lower: the chance of an American soldier being killed in Iraq has been about one in two hundred and fifty. The chances for a British soldier are much the same.

Nicolson ignores upper-class "Napoleonists", such as the Hollands, Fox, Whitbread, Byron et al, but makes much of ineffective proletarian unrest, to some extent fuelled by millenarian fantasies. Unmentioned are the Christian Evangelicals, more middle and upper class, a far more sober lot, the founders of what became Victorian morality, concerned rather with individual than mass behaviour, their social goals piecemeal, such as the abolition of the slave trade and boy chimney-sweeps and other ameliorations, rather than utopian. But religion seems to be rather marginalized in historical studies, perhaps as an unacknowledged, or even unconscious legacy of Marxism, whose believers could not credit that people meant what they said, but were "really" motivated by other, economic reasons.

Let a soldier - James Douglas, a corporal - speak:

But show me a man who knows he has an immortal soul, and advancing under the destructive fire of the enemy, but will in his inmost soul offer up the prayer of the publican ["God be merciful unto me a sinner": Luke 18, 13]. To bear me out in this, let 20, 30 nay as many thousands as ever mixed in battle, be advancing to the deadly strife and not one word can be heard in that number, but move on silent as the grave. I now ask the reason for this awful silence. The reason is that each man is employed as he ought to be with his maker. But when the fire is opened all is forgotten save king and country.

Swearing was also strongly disapproved of by the rank and file.

The biographies of Nelson (1758-1805) are legion; this study seems to have been well-reviewed and the back of the jacket is well-covered with laudatory remarks, making my dissent about it badly needed and almost to suggest that this book is an unnecessary one. We all know Nelson was charismatic, fascinated his "band of brothers" and was a hero to the British public ever since the Battle of the Nile. Tears by all ranks of the navy are well-authenticated. Faults recorded by Nicolson are the ones we condemn today, such as his grim enthusiasm for hanging deserters and Neapolitan Jacobins. His infatuation with Emma Hamilton (who seems to have made an unfavourable impression on all the women who met her) might be forgivable if they had conducted their affair with more discretion. A male friend of Nelson observed, "She goes on cramming Nelson with trowelfuls of flattery, which he goes on taking as quietly as a child does pap."

Perhaps this constant diet was responsible for his mixed behaviour on his only meeting with Wellington just before Trafalgar, when they were both waiting to see the Secretary of State, Lord Castlereigh, as related by the Duke to W.J. Croker, nearly 30 years later:

He entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was all on his side, and all about himself, and, really, in a style as to surprise and almost disgust me. I suppose something I happened to say may have made him guess that I was somebody, and he went out of the room for a moment, I have no doubt to ask the office-keeper who I was, for when he came back he was altogether a different man, both in manner and matter. All I had thought was a charlatan style had vanished, and he talked of the state of this country and of the aspect and probabilities of affairs on the Continent with a good sense, and a knowledge of subjects both at home and abroad, that surprised me equally and more agreeably than the first part of our interview had done; in fact he talked like an officer and a statesman. The Secretary of State kept us long waiting, and certainly, for the last half or three quarters of an hour I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more. Now if the Secretary of State had been punctual & admitted Lord Nelson in the first quarter of an hour, I should have had the same impression of a light and trivial character that other people have had, but luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw.

Note that this first impression of Nelson's behaviour as a "light and trivial character" was something that "other people had had." Probably this was why Barham, the aged (eighty plus) but exceptionally efficient First Lord of the Admiralty, who had never met Nelson was doubtful about him until after he had sent for and read his Naval Journals of his latest activities.

It is a great pity that Nelson did not survive Trafalgar to have more conferences with Wellington (Arthur Wellesley, as he then was), for if he had, he might have impressed on him the difficulty of combined army-navy operations, which, as we shall see, Wellington took for granted and never really quite understood. Napoleon was much worse in this respect, changing his plans almost daily, baffling the British Admiralty, which had plans to counter them all, almost as much as his subordinates who could not convince him that moving his ships over the sea was a far more complex business that moving his troops over the land.

The result of the battle

In 1919, Julian S. Corbett, doyen of naval historians, published his The Campaign of Trafalgar (in the reprint of 1976, the two volumes are bound as one and are still obtainable at a reasonable price). The bewildering preliminaries to the battle and the battle itself are given in exhaustive detail. In his Conclusion to Volume II he writes:

By universal assent Trafalgar is ranked as one of the decisive battles of the world, and yet of all great victories there is not one which to all appearance was so barren of immediate result... It gave England finally the dominion of the seas, but it left Napoleon dictator of the Continent. So incomprehensible was its apparent sterility that to fill the void a legend grew up that it saved England from invasion... unsupported as it was by the plain succession of events.

What events? In 1805 William Pitt, the British Prime Minister, had built up what must have seemed a strong Coalition (the Third) with Austria and Russia - Prussia dithered until it was too late. Cancelling his invasion plans (which he may have done anyway, since his naval support failed to materialize), Napoleon headed straight for Austria, captured part of its army at Ulm, occupied Vienna and inflicted a crushing defeat on the combined Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz on December 2nd. Austria sued for peace and the Third Coalition was dead. A British army, which had landed on the coast of West Germany to support the Austrians had to be withdrawn.

The next year, Prussia, after fruitless negotiations with Napoleon, foolishly declared war and was soundly defeated at Jena and Uerstadt in October. Napoleon then pursued the Russians to East Prussia. Eylau (Feb. 8th, 1807) was a bloody, drawn battle, but Friedland (June 14th) was a decisive victory, and at Tilsit (June 25th), the Russian Czar Alexander changed sides and became Napoleon's not very reliable ally.

Britain could do little but maintain its blockade as it watched the development of these appalling events. Pitt died in 1806 and the King had to call on the Whig opposition to form a government, headed by the pacifist Fox, who opened peace negotiations which came to nothing. Napoleon turned his attention to the only continental country not under his sway - Portugal. An army sent there met with no resistance, and the Royal Navy came just in time to persuade its Regent (its Queen was mad) to be transported to Brazil (Nov. 29th, 1807), a day before the French arrived in Lisbon.

Napoleon now obliged Britain by making an enormous political error. Spain was almost completely useless as an ally, but at least it was quiescent. Its monarchy was in the last stages of decadence, the King a near-idiot, the Queen, ignorant and wilful, who ruled him, with her favourite Godoy, and the Crown Prince uneducated and cowardly, at odds with his parents - but all obsequiously obedient to Napoleon. The whole top tier of society, the Army, the Church and the bureaucracy was irremediably corrupt and when Napoleon poured troops into Spain on the pretext of reinforcing his Army in Portugal, no one protested, even when they occupied key fortresses in the north and Madrid itself.

Then Napoleon went one step too far. He lured the Royal family to Bayonne, forced both King and Crown Prince to abdicate and announced that his brother Joseph was to be King of Spain. Then, at last, when those who should have been their leaders still remained passive, the common people, the mob, rose and rioted in French-occupied Madrid (May 2nd, 1808). Slowly. ill-organized and poorly led, all the provinces followed suit. A deputation from Asturias, on the northern coast came to Britain, now back under a pro-war Tory government, with a request for help (May 30th). This was forthcoming and the long story of the British part in the Peninsular War had begun.

The long aftermath: 1805-1814

Trafalgar may have established the dominance of the Royal Navy at sea, but it still had work to do, though of a more routine, less spectacular kind. The blockade had to be maintained for economic as well as military reasons. It might as well be pointed out here that wreckings were responsible for by far the greatest number of Royal Navy ship losses - not because of bad navigation, but because of the need to keep an eye on the enemy, even in bad weather, off treacherous coasts. Convoys still had to protected from privateers, which could not always be prevented from slipping out of beleaguered ports or small fortified inlets. It was also a necessity to inhibit traffic carrying supplies and reinforcements to isolated coastal garrisons in Spain, where transport by land was next to impossible.

Collingwood

Old Barham had been dismissed without thanks during the government shake-ups following Pitt's death. The Admiralty, under new management, though doubtless dismayed at the loss of Nelson, could be confident that the Navy was operating as efficiently as it did before. The immediate burden fell on Cuthbert Collingwood (1748-1810) who, no Watson to Nelson's Holmes, was, according to his biographer "a better seaman than Nelson, a subtler diplomat, and despite his conservative politics, a naval reformer at least fifty years ahead of his time. What Collingwood lacked and admired above all in his friend, was "the irresistible Nelsonian impetuosity that allowed his enemy no time to recover once he had made a mistake." In a letter praising Nelson, Collingwood wrote: "Everything seemed as if by enchantment, to prosper under his direction - but it was the effect of system - and nice combination, not of chance..."

The two had in fact been friends for thirty two years when Nelson fell at Trafalgar, having met in the West Indies during the American War of Independence. Not the slightest trace of jealousy tainted their relationship, though in his last letter to Colllingwood (Oct. 9th) Nelson seems to express a little guilt at possibly having aroused it. Collingwood repudiated any as far as he was concerned: with others it would far more likely, (especially if his behaviour was as Wellington had described it - not mentioned by Collingwood.)

Adams states that, as a prelude to Trafalgar, on 20th August "Collingwood pulled off one of the most extraordinary tactical victories of the war. It is barely mentioned by the majority of historians." Cruising with a small force off Cadiz he was confronted by Villaneuve's fleet of 26 returning from the West Indies. They were almost certain to be hoping to pass into the Mediterranean where they could do much damage. First he pretended to chase them, then, using one of the oldest ruses in the book, started signalling to non-existent support over the horizon. Villaneuve fell for this, and made for Cadiz instead - just where Collingwood wanted him to be. "Trafalgar would otherwise not have happened."

Collingwood had his own grievances: his distinguished service at the Battle of the First of June (1794) was not reported, almost certainly becuse of the ill-will of the drafter of Lord Howe's dispatch, and the patent for his elevation to a barony did not include descent through the female line - and Collingwood had only two daughters. Unlike Nelson, Collingwood was a devoted family man, but was unable to see any of them - wife or daughters - which he longed to do, during the last five years of his life.

An inclusion in the "family" was the dog Bounce, though his breed, or even size, is unknown to us, apart from the fact that he had grown as high as Collingwood's desk. For a lonely Admiral he was the perfect confidant and in other ways the ideal Navy dog, though he could never stand the sound of gunfire, immediately going below. He routinely swam behind the Admiral's barge when he went ashore, until he was too tired to do so, thereby missing an opportunity of having his portrait painted. Back in Britain, he accompanied Collinwood in his long walks when the Admiral, his pockets full of acorns, went in search of suitable sites to plant them.

After his elevation to the peerage, Collingwood humourously depicts Bounce's behaviour - maybe a gentle hint to his wife and daughters, who were enjoying their new status perhaps too much and too expensively:

I am out of all patience with Bounce. The consequential airs he gives himself since he became the right honourable dog are insufferable. He considers beneath his dignity to play with commoners' dogs, and truly thinks that he does them grace when he condescends to lift up his leg against them. This, I think, is carrying the insolence of rank to the extreme, but he is a dog does it.

Sad to say, Bounce, now 18 years old and as crippled by arthritis as his master, fell overboard one night in August 1809 and drowned. Collingwood grieved greatly at his death.

Collingwood was the Admiral in change of Mediterranean matters, which did not merely mean keeping an eye on any French fleet manoeuvres from Toulon but the whole diplomacy, from Turkey in the east, to the Barbary corsairs in the west, whom he had to indicate that piracy on British shipping was a no-go pursuit, while depending on them for fresh water, fresh vegetables and beef, which they could count on being paid for. His dealings with the troublesome Bourbons of Naples, now confined to Sicily, showed that he was far from feeling the fascination Nelson had for that unstable monarchy.

Collingwood died on 7th March 1810, a day after his ship set sail for home. Though a post-mortem revealed a growth in his stomach he had, in reality, worn himself out in the service of his country. He was buried beside Nelson in St. Paul's Cathedral.

The Navy and Spain 1807-1814

Christopher Ball's Wellington' Navy fills, as they used to say, a long-felt want, though not wanted, apparently, as much as it deserves to be. The author points out that Paul Kennedy in his "seminal work" The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery merely remarks that the Navy provided "logistical support and added mobility". The fact is that without it the British role in the peninsula would have been a failure. Unfortunately naval and military historians seem never to have communicated. To take just one example: even Oman, in his seven-volume history makes little mention of the Navy's part in the long defence of Cadiz which was more of a naval than a military one. Added to this neglect must be the lack of any large set-piece battle in the area Hall deals with.

How much trouble Wellington gave the Admiralty can be judged from their (all but) final rebuke by its clearly exasperated First Lord, Lord Melville:

I will take your opinion in preference to any other person's as to the most effectual mode of beating a French army, but I have no confidence in your seamanship or nautical skill. Neither will I defer to the opinions upon such matters of the gentlemen under your command who are employed in the siege of St. Sebastian, and which happen to be at variance with those of every naval officer in His Majesty's service.

We can be thankful that Wellington was not in the same position as Napoleon, Britain's long-evolved Constitution having prevented anything of the sort.

This a book which, without any lengthy analysis, I can recommend to those who wish to know more of this subject: Just read it!

Other activities of the Royal Navy

The Command of the Seas enabled Britain to found its second Empire, picking up the Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies (the last of which was returned to Holland), as well as taking as much of the West Indies as it really wanted. During the War of 1812 against the Americans, it, by the end, righted the balance of the early defeats by powerful American frigates.

But these acquisitions did not really hurt Napoleon. Only the Peninsular War, fought on continental soil could really make a difference - which it did, Napoleon contributed with his errors: not going himself there after his initial incursion, which sent Sir John Moore racing for Corunna - a task left to Soult. He left a divided command and attempted to dictate strategy when his information and implementation took months, and was totally impracticable.

Other books consulted

Froude: The Reign of Mary Tudor
Mahan: Life of Nelson - for Croker
Robert Gardiner, Ed.: The Campaign of Trafalgar 1803-1805
Robert Gardiner &al: Winning theNapoleonic War 1806-1814

The Latham Diaries
Mark Latham
Melbourne University Press, 2005

Mark Latham was a young idealistic figure when he joined the Australian Labour Party in 1979; within a decade he had become a Mayor of the Sydney suburb of Liverpool. In 1994, he became a federal MP, and in 2004 as leader of the Australian Labor Party, he lead the party to defeat in an Australian federal election. In January 2005, he retired from public life, and late last month, his 'diaries' were published.

The dairies are almost wholly political, covering his political career from his entry to Federal Parliament, although the published portions of the diary deal mostly with the period when Latham was a major figure in Australian public life, from 2002 to early 2005.

One has to wonder at the exact veracity of the material published; as Latham's career grows and he climbs the 'greasy pole', he becomes more and more assidious in keeping his journal. In addition, the diaries deal almost wholly with matters within his own party; of events pertaining to the government he is trying to defeat, Latham has nothing to say; events outside political life have no place whatsover in this book. One suspects these are as much memoirs as diaries, although at any rate we can accept this book as the author's account of the events he describes.

The diaries reveal a man whose worldview is rather unusual. Latham has no time for the old socialist homilies. He's opposed to the rent-seeking elements that live in harmony with the Australian Labor Party, and instead chose to identify himself with the 'aspirational' voters, ambitious working-class people who have done well for themselves. A perceptive friend remarked to me that "Australia is the place where the English and Irish lower classes went and found paradise". That is as good a description of the country as any; and these people and their descendants have no time for socialist daydreamers, but they do have a healthy appetite for government services paid for by someone else. Latham looked to make himself the champion of these people.

Latham is, to say the least, a mercurial personality. While he was a smart enough guy, compared to his colleagues, he was a divided soul. While his head was forward looking, trying his hand at the eternal social-democratic dream of 'reinventing government', and placing great stress in dispersing power away from government and corporate elites, Latham had the heart and soul of an old fashioned class warrior. He always calls his Liberal opponents 'Tories' and hates them; he displays a fair degree of disdain for anyone that is not of his cultural and political type. A rare day at the cricket reveals the truth of the man- he's a working class yobbo, happiest on the Hill with his rugby-league mates.

To sum up the actual contents, it is basically an account of how Latham's pure policy driven agenda is constantly thwarted by the 'Old-Guard' of the ALP, and the terrible tactics that they, and their mates in the media, employ against him. Despite all this, after many battles, Latham becomes leader, despite many misgivings on the part of his colleagues. At first, all goes well; Latham certainly is different to the regular run of the mill politician, and he has long serving Prime Minister John Howard caught on the hop. But as time goes by, doubts start to emerge about Latham, his character, policies, and his lack of drive for the job. A nasty ex-wife emerges from the past, allegations of sexual misconduct and a mysterious 'videotape' emerge, and Latham loses his way. He leads the party to defeat in the election, amid private health worries, and then all hell breaks loose as his internal party enemies plot against him, aided by the media. Latham, sick, disenchanted, decides that the game is not worth the candle, picks up his bat and ball, and goes home.

Any work of an autobiographical nature is revealing, because it is a written self-portrait. It is often amazing the gap between how we see ourselves and how others see us. The first thing that should be said is that Latham is a guy that is deeply devoted to his family. Apart from that, it is not clear what is true or false about this guy. Certainly few people have ever been less charitable about others. He revels in an entry running down a rival, or making a joke at someone else's expense.

Of course, Latham is writing about his party colleagues, and from what can be discerned from other sources, it is quite possible that when Latham describes them as backstabbing, anti-intellectual corrupt cowards, he is stating nothing more then the truth. The ruthless, machine-style nature of Australian Labor Party internal politics has been obvious to the general public for fifty years or more.

So one is obliged to ask how a man could rise to the top of this party after less then ten years in the Federal Parliament. A rise that rapid seems rather unlikely by itself; that such a rapid rise could occur with the man in question having squeaky-clean hands himself seems impossible to credit. But the diaries have no 'confessions' of any great intrigues by Latham, only against him.

It must be said that part of Latham's rapid rise was that he was a talented politician in a deeply untalented party. Latham clearly did care deeply about policy solutions to the problems of people; the diaries themselves suggest that most of his colleagues could not look past their own entitlements as MPs. As a candidate for the office of Prime Minister, though, Latham is caught out by the narrowness of his vision; for Latham, local issues are everything, his policy concerns are about community, society and better services. To be fair, he knows the importance of fiscal discipline, and I personally enjoyed his derision of his left-wing colleagues the most in this book. But on foreign policy and security he's a non-starter; Bush is a greater menace to Australians then terrorists, people that join the defence forces are dismissed as 'meatheads' with attitude problems. There has been a general consensus that 'Australia dodged a bullet' when Latham missed out on being Prime Minister; after reading these diaries I agree with this more then ever.

Since the diaries were released, Latham has come in for intense ridicule from the media and his political enemies, which is to say, nearly everyone in Australian public life. This is not surprising; Latham has tipped a bucket of manure over nearly everyone. His predecessor and successor as ALP leader, Kim Beazley, comes out worse, and to be honest Latham does raise some good questions about him. The media come off just as bad. For example, Deborah Snow is depicted as 'The Abominable Snow woman' (Latham has a bad habit of nicknaming everyone) mostly for this feature. Reading about the intensity of the coverage he faces, I found it possible to feel sympathy for Latham, who is mostly worried about protecting his family. And Australian journalists certainly do deserve a bucketing.

Despite the ridicule Latham has received in turn, some of it deserved, the book is selling like hot cakes. And deservedly so, because Latham's style is entertaining. It is certainly revealing enough about the chronic dysfunction in the Australian Labor Party, and Latham himself is pessimistic about it. There are the usual warts one must expect of a polemic volume that is a self-justifying political figure. With that health warning in mind, for serious students of Australian politics, or social-democratic parties, or political junkies of any sort, this book is a fine read.

The Assassins
Bernard Lewis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1967
(reissued 2001, with new preface)

Who they were and who they were not: their long lineage

Perhaps it would be best to start by saying what the Assassins were not. In his preface to the 2001 edition, Lewis states clearly:

According to a view widespread in the western world since mediaval times, the anger and the weapons of the Assassins were directed primarily against the Crusaders. This simply is not true. In the long list of their victims, there were very few Crusaders... The vast majority of their victims were Muslims and their attacks were directed not against the outsider, seen as basically irrelevant, but against the dominant elites and prevailing ideas of the Muslim world of their time.

Their Muslim opponents and potential victims responded in kind:

To kill them [preached one menaced cleric] is more lawful than rainwater. It is the duty of Sultans and kings to conquer and kill them, and cleanse the surface of the earth from their pollution. It is not right to associate or form friendships with them, nor to eat meat butchered by them, nor to enter into marriage with them. To shed the blood of a heretic is more meritorious that to kill seventy Greek infidels, [i.e., the Byzantines, their centuries-old enemies].

Lewis also rejects the tales (though current in the early 13th Century, and included in Marco Polo's Travels) of "earthly paradises" in which drugged disciples woke to experience the promised pleasures of the world to come, after they had accomplished their suicidal mission. Furthermore, Lewis even rejects the hypothesis of a direct connexion with hashish, the effects of which were known long before the sect began its activities in Syria, where the name became attached to them, he suggests, as a term of abuse.

The religious provenance of the Assassins is a long one, and impatient readers might care to skip to the section below titled 1090: The Story Really starts.

Islam's leadership (Caliph) problem

Then who were the Assassins? Although their first assassination took place in 1092, the Muslim sect that took this up as a matter of policy had a long lineage going back almost the origins of Islam. Muhammad, Islam's charismatic founder, had left no intructions as to the succession, which, if he had attended to the matter, might have solved the problem that plagued almost every Muslim dynasty ever after.

Legitimists versus Opportunists: Shi'a versus Sunni

The first three Successors (caliphs), Abu Bakr, Omar and Othman, were associates and early supporters of Muhammad himself. The first had deputised for the prophet during his last illness, so his position seemed a natural continuation of that status; he in turn designated Omar as his successor, while Omar, who was mortally stabbed by a Christian (he was greatly relieved it was not a Muslim) appointed six electors to decide on his. Othman's caliphate (644-656) ended with his murder by mutineers and this was the opportunity for Ali, son-in-law of Muhammad to assert his claim by heredity. He defeated and killed two claimants but was tricked into negotiating with a third opponent and betrayed by his own advocate. Ali was murdered in 661 for a reason that seems more personal than political, and became the first Muslim martyr, to be followed by his two sons, al-Hasan, who died at the age of 45, possibly of poison (669), and al-Husayn, who was killed, together with all but one of his sons, in what was more a massacre than a battle, at Karbala (680). But the party of Ali, the Shi'atu Ali, survived as the Shi'a, and Ali left plenty of descendants.

The Sunni: The Ummayad and Abbasid Caliphates

The winning side, the Sunni (the orthodox, as far as such a translation means anything) seem never to have been troubled by how the succession to the caliphate was established, accepting in a pragmatic way whatever came about. Mu'awiyah I (661-680), the first caliph to die a natural death since No 2, was proclaimed caliph on the death of Ali, with no other qualifications than that he was a competent governor and distantly related to the prophet Muhammad. As was now becoming normal, he had to eliminate some rivals.

Nominating his son Yezid as successor, he declared the succession hereditary and founded the Ummayad Caliphate (661-750). A rebellion established the Abbasids, who massacred all the Ummayads, with one exception, who fled to Spain and established a continuation of the dynasty there. The actual power of the Abbasid caliphs was brief, about a hundred years, but they continued, under Turkish control, until the caliphate was extinguished by the Mongols in 1258. It would be tedious to enumerate the caliphs, puppets or otherwise, that got murdered during this period. It is sufficient to say that there seems to have been no inhibition against it.

765: The Shi'a: The emergence of the Ismaili Sect

Meanwhile the Shi'a, also known as Alids and later Fatimids (after Muhammad's daughter Fatima, wife of Ali), continued to survive, giving rise to some unsuccessful rebellions and splitting into two sects. They were led by Imams, descendants of Ali and Fatima, all "moderate, pliant, yet resolute - who preserved and enriched the Shi ite faith." There were twelve of these; the last "disappeared", Lewis says, about 873, and is still "the awaited one". Mainstream Shi'as, from which other sects defected, are known as "Twelvers".

The first split among the Shi'a occurred in 765, when Ismail, the eldest son of the previous Imam, was passed over in favour of a younger one, whom most Shi'a accepted. Those who did not formed a sect known as the Ismailis. For some 150 years the Ismaili Imams "remained hidden". At the end of the ninth century, the Abbaside caliphate was falling apart, and the caliphs themselves were mere puppets, initially of a Persian Shi'ite dynasty. Their sultans decided it was easier to keep the Sunni caliphate, rather than instal a Shi'ite one.

909: The Shi'a: The establishment of the Fatimid Caliphate

This did no good to either the Sunnis or the moderate Shi'ites and left the field open to the Ismailis, who, with the establishment of a power base in the Yemen, sent missionaries all over the Muslim world, from India to North Africa. In the latter "they achieved their most spectacular success", and there in 909 their "hidden Imam" emerged to proclaim himself caliph, founding a new dynasty, the Fatimids (909-1171). Their greatest achievement was their capture of Egypt, but they failed to conquer the Sunni heartland, and like the Abbasids, became, for their last hundred years, puppets of a military elite originally called in to prop them up.

1094: The Ismailis split: Mustalis and Nizaris

A split among the Ismailis, possibly engineered by the Fatimid military pupper master, came in 1094 on the death of the caliph. The caliph's elder son, Nizar, was excluded in favour of a much younger one, al-Mustali, "a youth without allies and supporters, who would consequently be entirely dependent on his powerful patron" who also arranged to become his father-in-law. Nizar led a rebellion, and was killed, but his followers remained, refusing any allegiance to the Fatimid caliph. In 1130, after the murder of the caliph al-Amir, the son and successor of al-Mustali by Nizaris or the Syrian Assassins, with whom they had come to terms, the remaining Ismailis also defected from the Fatimid caliphate, claiming that a lost infant son of al-Amir, called Tayyib, was the hidden and awaited Iman. The tottering Fatimids, now nominally even confined to Egypt, were put an end to by their final patron, Saladin, in 1171, and the population restored to the Sunni fold of the Abassid caliphate.

The Seljuk Turks and the Ismaili "New Preaching"

The Ismaili split remained, but while the "Mustalis" stagnated in Islam's backwaters, the "Nizaris" who had, for reasons not stated, been responsible for the murder of al-Amir, became the mainstream Ismaili movement and flourished. One reason why it did was the unusually chaotic state of the Middle East, into which the Seljuk Turks (luckily for Islam, Sunni converts) had been extending their Central Asian empire since the beginning of the 11th century. As the newcomers displaced the old Arab and Persian aristocracy, discontent was expressed and exploited, inevitably in a religious guise, by the Ismaili "new preaching" and by the charismatic Hassani Sabbah, initiator of assassination as political instrument and policy, whose activities began before the Ismaili split in 1094.

1090: The story really starts: Hassani Sabbah, founder of "The Assassins"

Hassani Sabbah (1050?-1124) was born in Qum, then as now a centre of Shi'a orthodoxy in Iran, experienced a traumatic conversion to the Ismaili sect and then travelled widely to propagate its doctrines, usually getting into trouble wherever he went (Lewis gives much information of these wanderings, both in his text and in his notes). Finally he found the ideal area to set up a power base, in the Elburz mountains in Northern Iran, bordering the Caspian, where the local tribe, the Daylamis, notorious for their independence, had been the last Persians to convert to Islam (peacefully, at that) and were well-infiltrated by Ismaili believers. A fortress in this region would be desirable, and there were plenty of them.

His choice finally fell on the castle of Alamut, built on a narrow ridge on the top of a high rock in the heart of the Elburz mountains and dominating an enclosed and cultivated valley about thirty miles long and three miles wide at the broadest point. More than 6000 feet above sea level, the castle was several hundred feet above the base of the rock and could be reached only by a steep and winding path. The approach to the rock was through the narrow gorge of the Alamut river, between perpendicular and sometimes overhanging cliffs.

So Alamut was impregnable other than to starvation or subversion and Hassani, in 1090, chose the latter course, by converting the inhabitants of the castle (or enough of them) using his missionaries from the surrounding countryside, and then arriving unobtrusively there himself. It was a bloodless takeover and the helpless governor was, according to one account, sent off with a draft of 3000 gold dinars in compensation. Hassani never left the castle and ruled his growing domain in the surrounding mountains and valleys from there, capturing or building castles, while like-minded Ismailis dominated the province of Quhistan, some five hundred miles away and missionaries sowed the seed in distant Syria (see below).

1092: Assassination No. 1; rationale and technique

Three important events took place in 1092. In July the Seljuk Sultan Malikshah sent an army to capture Alamut, which failed to do so On 16th October, the Sultan's Vizier, Nizam-al-Mulk, was the victim of the first assassination by a volunteer dispatched by Hassani, and in November the Sultan died. The next Sultan was so busy (as normal) securing the succession that he made overtures to Hassani about assassinating his competitor. This just made things worse, Ismailis, sufficiently strong in numbers to make suggestive threats, infiltrated his court and everybody who was anybody went around in body-armour.

For assassinations were, it must be emphasised, carried out on particular individuals for particular reasons and also at close quarters, where the victim must be stabbed to death. The assassins could not hope to survive; indeed, if by some chance they did, this was regarded as some sort of dereliction.

When his hands were free, the Sultan set about campaigning against the Ismailis, but without success, though the next (his erst-while rival) did the Ismailis some damage. There could be little continuity in such efforts, when they ground to a halt on the death of each Sultan. During all this period assassinations went steadily on. One significant one was the murder of the Egyptian Vizier/puppet-master in 1121, which liberated the Fatimid caliph from tutelage and who invited the Nizaris to renounce their claims. However this came to nothing and negotiations with Hassani also ceased when it became apparent that he had plans to assassinate the caliph and his Vizier. The caliph was murdered anyway by the Nizaris in 1130, as recorded above, though the Syrian Assassins were also suspected.

When Hassani died, any hopes by his enemies of a normal succession crisis were dashed; his deputy, Buzurgimid, a castle-taker on his own account and appointed by Hassani to succeed him, took his place at Alamut without any dissension. He ruled from 1124 to 1138 and assassinations dropped of - "The list... is comparatively short, though not undistinguished", as Lewis puts it. The murder of the Abbasid caliph al-Mustarshid must be regarded as a sort of bonus, caused by perhaps deliberate inattention (vigorously denied, of course) to his safekeeping by his kidnapper, the Seljuk Sultan Mas'ud.

Buzurgumid's son, Muhammad (1138-1162) succeeded, again without trouble, so again disappointing the many enemies of the Ismailis. Fourteen assassinations, "a meagre haul compared with the great days of Hassani Sabbah" are recorded for his 24 year reign, "the great struggle to overthrow the old order... had dwindled into border squabbles and cattle-raids. The castle strongholds... had become the centres of local sectarian dynasties, of a type not uncommon in Islamic history," especially during this period. There is some evidence that the Ismailis and the Seljuk Overlord Sultan Sanjay often went into alliance against common enemies. Some Ismailis, however, yearned for the more activist days of Hassani Sabbah, including the heir apparent, Hasan, who immersed himself in the teaching of the Founder, and, despite the suspicions and misgivings of his father, behaved with sufficient discretion to succeed, again without trouble, on his death.

1165-1210: Anti-nomianism in Islam

Hasan (1163-1166) inaugurated a very radical policy for Ismaili Islam, nothing other than the abolition of Shari'a Law. Such antinomianism ("against law") has manifested itself several times within Christianity, justified in its case that since a sinner is saved by faith, any subsequent behaviour is irrelevant. Islamic antinomianism, which Lewis speaks of as "recurrent", and gives an example from the early 8th Century, though its manifestations were most likely a relic of pre-Islamic practices, has different causes but much the same result.

Two and a half years after his accession, Hasan staged a dramatic ceremony in the courtyard of Alamut, to which Ismaili representative had been summoned from all over the Muslim world. It was in the middle of Ramadan, the pulpit so arranged that the audience had their backs to Mecca, that he announced the arrival of the Millennium; the "hidden" Nizari Imam had been resurrected, and he was his deputy (da'i); later he changed his mind and claimed to be his grandson. Consequent to this happening, Shari'a Law must be abandoned "because in this period of of the Resurrection [men] must turn in every sense towards God and abandon the rites of religious law and established habits of worship." This proclamation was followed by a banquet, complete with wine, and delegates sped away with the good news, which was joyfully received in Quhistan and Syria, who put the injunctions into practice. In a total turn-around, those who adhered to the Shari a were punished as severely as those who formerly had broken it.

Although Hasan was murdered by his brother-in-law, strictly on religious grounds, his nineteen year old son Muhammad II (1166-1210) succeeded smoothly and continued with his father's policies and elaborated his theology. However, Lewis remarks that the whole extraordinary interlude seems to have had little influence of the rest of the Islamic world - at least if contemporary Sunni historians are anything to go by. Their attention was only drawn to it after the destruction of Alamut in 1256 by the Mongols when Ismaili writings on the subject became available. Again, assassinations seem to have dropped off, though in the case of at least one anti-Ismaili cleric, intimidation seems to have been enough. However, the threat of assassination seems to have continued right to the end, with an emissary to the Mongol Khan Hulegu explaining that he had to wear a mail shirt for fear of it. When Muhammad II died his son, Jalal al-Din (1210-1221) reversed his father's religious policy, an about-turn accepted by the wider Ismaili community, though some suspected his sincerity.

1194: The end of the Seljuk Era

The Seljuk Great Sultanate, which had conquered the Middle East in the early 11th century, was disintegrating. It was never an empire proper and though Seljuk Turks formed the aristocracy of the region, there was no cohesion among them prepared to face the challenge that was coming - the Mongols. One region that was now completely independent was Khorasm, between the Oxus and the Caspian, whose ruler, styling himself Khorasmshah, was now moving south into Persia. In the battle of Rayy, the last Seljuk Sultan was defeated and killed and the Khorasmshah assumed that he would now become the protector of the Abbasid caliph, as Sultan of Baghdad. In this he was mistaken; during the breakup of the Great Sultanate, the caliph al-Nasir (1180-1225) had achieved independence himself and was in no mood to surrender it. In fact the Abbaside Caliphate achieved a brief, and final, flowering. The Khorasmians anyway had enough to do, trying to resist the Mongols, who ultimately obliterated them; they also incurred the enmity of the Ismailis, conducting massacres, to which the Ismailis retaliated with assassinations.

The Ismaili lord of Alamut (no longer claiming the Imamate), Jalal-al-Din was succeeded by his only son, aged nine, Ala al-Din (1221-1255), who seems from quite an early age to have shown signs of madness. Business seems to have effectively carried out by his vizier and subordinates, who ensured that Alamut continued to be a center of learning, respected even by Sunni scholars. They also kept up the time-honoured tradition of assassination and intimidation, though the intricacies of feuds and alliances would take us too far from our theme. Finally Ala al-Din was murdered and though his son, Rukn al-Din was not sorry to have it happen, a severe and incapacitating illness at the time exculpated him from any direct involvement. Several probably innocent persons were put to death for the crime: no one knows who was really responsible.

1258: The last of the Alamut Ismailis

Rukn al-Din (1255-1258), the last of the Alamut Ismailis, attempted desperately to appease the Mongols. Early in 1258, they sacked Baghdad and put to death the last caliph, Mutasim (1242-1258) and all of his kin they could find, extinguishing the Abbasid Caliphate. No candidate for caliph, an obviously empty title, emerged, though the Ottoman Sultans, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century found it convenient to assume the role when dealing with the Western powers. Rukn al-Din lasted a little longer; the Mongols extracted from him all they could in the way of surrendering Ismaili strongholds, including Alamut, and then murdered him after he had travelled all the way to Karakorum, in vain, to plead to be left with something - Hulegu did not even grant him an interview.

1260: The Mongols repulsed from Syria

Hulegu's conquests, with their usual massacres, extended into Syria, but having left an army to consolidate these, it was destroyed at the battle of Ain Jalud by the Egyptian Mameluke Kotos in 1260, and the Mongol movement westward was finally halted. However, Hulegu established a kingdom with a Persian core and though himself remaining a pagan, being buried with appropriate heathen rites (virgins strangled to accompany him &c), perforce used the Muslim elite as administrators. Half a century later, his great-grandson, now a devout Muslim, was consecrating much time and energy to the revival of the culture Hulegu had attempted to destroy. Unfortunately for Muslim unity, the population was Shi'a, and Persia/Iran has remained a Shi'a state from that day to this.

The Mongols left of the Ismailis only a remnant in the Middle East and Persia, but a mission to faraway India had been successful and their tradition asserts that a small son of Rukn al-Din survived to sire a line of Imams, whose descendant today is the Aga Khan. In Syria also the sect during all this time had flourished and to its activities there we must now turn, though they did not survive the Alamut Assassins for very long.

1100- 1273: The Assassins in Syria

Missionaries from the Assassin stronghold of Alamut established by Hassani Sabbah found the mountainous terrain of northern Syria at once suitable and familiar as a venue for a power-base, but their inhabitants less amenable for it to be used as such, partly, Lewis suggests, because the emissaries were Persians. As well as indigeous "moderate" Ismailis, there were plenty of other sects to cultivate and convert, including the Druzes, who had broken away from the orthodox Egyptian Fatimids, on the disappearance of the Caliph al-Hakim in 1021, believing, in what seems a standard Muslim convention, that he would reappear in the near or far future. The Alawites, despite their orthodox Shi'a "Twelver" beliefs, combined these with "extremist" tendencies and must have seemed suitable material.

A policy of local alliances: Aleppo 1100-1124

The Assassins (a name of Syrian origin, dating from this time, which we can now use legitimately) managed to sieze, in 1106, the fortress of Afamiya, some 150 miles south-west of Aleppo, where they had many sympathisers, including its ruler Ridwan, who was more than suspected of making use of their services. Or, as Lewis puts it: "the Assassins offered [him] the possibilty of... compensating for his military weakness among his rivals in Syria."

It was not, however, any of these who eliminated Afamiya, but Tancred, Prince of Antioch, or more precisely, Regent for his uncle Bohemond, who was a captive of the Danishmend Turks and whose ransom, for various reasons, no one, including his nephew, was in a hurry to pay. He is the first crusader Lewis introduces, in many ways typical of the Norman variety, brave, land-hungry (Antioch should have been returned to the Byzantines) and devious, but we have no time to say anything about him here. I have relegated to an Appendix information, which the general public seems to badly need, about the Crusades and Crusaders, who became a factor in the Near East after their capture of Jerusalem in 1099.

Unable to secure an independent base, the Assassins continued to operate courtesy of the rulers of Aleppo and Damascus. They lost no time about it; in 1103 they assassinated the ruler of Homs (possibly to oblige Ridwan) and, to quote Lewis: "The history of the Syrian Ismailis, as recorded by the Syrian historians, is chiefly the history of the assassinations which they perpetrated." Only a decade after the seizure of Alamut, and the first assassination organized from there, the Syrian Assassins were following the precepts of Hassani Sabbah.

This state of affairs couldn't last, of course. Ridwan of Aleppo died in 1113 and relations with his son, Alp Arslan, deteriorated. Not long after his accession, the leader of the Assassins was executed and 200 of his followers punished in various ways by the commander of the town militia, who was assassinated when he fell from favour and fled the city in 1119. Finally, in 1124, the Ismailis (or at least those suspected of Assassin tendencies) were expelled from Aleppo.

The policy continued: Damascus 1124-1128

Undaunted, their leader, Bahram (a Persian, as his name suggests) moved to Damascus where he was well received by its ruler, Tughtigin, though more so by his Vizier. Tughtegin not only gave him the castle of Banyas, situated just his side of the Jordan, the boundary of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, but also a building, described as palace, for his headquarters. Bahram himself was killed in a raid, where an expedition to gain converts had turned into a typical Arab feud, and was succeeded by another Persian, Ismail, who carried on his policies and activities. But just as in Aleppo, when Tughtegin died in 1128, an even fiercer reaction against the Ismailis, and their protector, the Vizier, followed. The Vizier was murdered and 6 - 20,000 Ismailis (according to which source is believed) were massacred.

1128: The Assassins have to become autonomous

Ismail fled, surrendered Banyas to the Crusaders and took refuge in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, where he died in 1130. His asylum-seeking should not arouse surprise; already the Crusaders were just one of the small Levant states making or breaking alliances or at war with each other in kaleidoscopic fashion. When immigrants arrived in the Kingdom of Jerusalem eager to kill Muslims - anyMuslims - their hosts had to explain that things weren't quite that simple: there was a truce with Them, but it was open season against Them.

Lewis is a little vague as to how the Ismailis managed to survive during the few years before they finally secured defensible territory, especially castles. All the same, they managed to continue with their assassinations, though it was from Alamut that retribution came to Toghtegin's son, Buri, despite his wearing armour and his armed guard. In 1132, the Assassins bought the fortress of Qadmus, then acquired al-Khaf in 1136, securing Khawabi, Rusafa, Qulaya and Maniqa about the same time, and in 1140, what became their most important stronghold, Masyaf. Almost all of these are on Lewis's map, clustered in the mountainous region of the Jebal Bahra, and on the border of the County of Tripoli, (feudal dependancy of the Kingdom of Jerusalem), with which they were usually on good terms, though for some reason they assassinated its Count, Raymond II in 1152, incidentally their first Crusader victim.

The Assassins were much less worried about the Crusaders than about their Muslim enemies, by Zangi (1100-1150) in the north and Saladin (1137-1193) in the south. Zangi, the independent governor of Mosul, founded a dynasty (1127-1262) which in absorbing the minor Syrian states, such as Aleppo, Damascus and Homs, inevitably came into collision with the Assassins. Two governors, or emirs, of Mosul had already been assassinated, in 1113 and in 1126, obviously in anticipation of such a western move. The behaviour of the Zangids towards the Ismailis in general and the Assassins in particular fully justified their fear of them.

The threat from Saladin, "protector" of the Fatimid caliphs arose from the alliance of the Ismailis with the Nizaris, their theological differences either ignored or forgotten. The Assassins seem to have neutralised Saladin to some extent by two serious and nearly successful attempts on his life in 1176 and later by demonstrating there were plenty of Assassins among his entourage. Perhaps he was also reminded that, before he was born the man responsible for the disinheriting of Nizar was assassinated (in 1121) and, in 1130, the Fatimid caliph himself, quite probably by the Assassins.

Another account by a later historian gives a sounder reason for the Assassins' hostility. A raid from anti-Shi'a Iraqis had massacred some 13,000 Ismailis - it must be remembered that most Ismailis lived peaceful lives as far as it was possible; only what might be termed the activists kept to their castles, from where they organized any necessary fighting and assassinations. Saladin had taken advantage of this raid to conduct some massacres of Ismailis himself, winding up besieging Masyaf, the Assassins' main stronghold. Somehow (the facts are obscure) a non-aggression pact was negotiated and neither side troubled the other for some time after. Otherwise, it is difficult not to assume that the Assassins could have eliminated Saladin had they really decided to do so. For by this time (see below) the Assassins had been organized into an efficient menace to those who aroused their hostility.

1162: Sinan, "The Old Man of the Mountain" takes charge.

Sinan ibn Salman ibn Muhammad, also known as Rashid al-Din (1133-1193), the only Assassin that anyone in the West seems ever to have heard of, came from Basra, with, so he claimed, credentials from Alamut, having been brought up with the two sons of Muhammad II, Hasan (who succeeded him) and Husayn. That may have been so, and certainly it is unlikely that he could have attained his position without such credentials, probably from Hasan, but he emancipated himself so successfully from obedience to Alamut, that the "Chief Missionary," writes an Arab historian, "sent emissaries from Alamut a number of times to kill him, fearing usurpation of the headship, and Sinan used to kill them. Some of them he deceived and dissuaded from carrying out their orders." It is to him that most myths and legends of Assassin practices have been attached. Indeed, one Christian visitor testified to one of these being demonstrated in his presence, when a number of his disciples, at his command, unhesitating leapt to their deaths from the walls into the depths below.

Sinan turned out to be as charismatic as the Assassins' founder Hassani Sabbah, and as efficent an organizer. The same historian quoted above summed up his achievements and status:

He built fortresses in Syria for the sect. Some were new and some were old ones which he had obtained by stratagems and fortified and made inaccessible. Time spared him and kings took care not to attack his possessions for fear of the murderous attacks of his henchmen. He ruled Syria for thirty-odd years.

Although their main enemies remained Moslems, the Assassins had to turn some of their attention to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem which with the Principality of Antioch controlled the Levantine coastline from Cilicia to Egypt. Their major assassination coup, in 1192, was that of the claimant-King of Jerusalem, Conrad of Montferrat, who had saved its remnants from disintegration after the capitulation of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. Even so, it may actually have been a personal matter. Runciman, who goes into the matter in his The Kingdom of Acre (volume 3 of his History of the Crusades) in more depth that does Lewis, says Conrad refused to give compensation for a ship of Sinan's he had captured. The survivor of the two assassins (contrary to Lewis, who says both assassins were siezed alive, Runciman states that only one was killed), under torture, failed to implicate anyone else. In realistic terms the Assassins had nothing to gain by the consolidation of Muslim power into a single state, stretching from Egypt to Iraq, as witnessed by their extirpation when this actually happened.

Though the Assassins' suicide missions invariably targeted (or blackmailed) specific powerful or influential people - caliphs, sultans, viziers, governors, distinguished visitors and the occasional hostile cleric, for whom intimidation was usually enough, one category of leader was left untouched, the Masters of the celibate Military Orders, the Templars, Hospitallers and the Knights of St. John. It was a waste of resources to assassinate these, for they would be replaced by men just as tough and dedicated to their vocation. In fact, like all the other powers, in the area, local, territorial or institutional, the Orders came to terms with the Assassins, either paying or receiving "protection money", for immunity for pilgrims or caravans as the situation fluctuated. Under these circumstances, assassinations were unnecessary - the threat was enough. If anything, the Assassins leaned towards the Christian powers, who, they knew, would have to be physically ejected before a unified Muslim state could be established in the area.

1193-1273: The last years and end of the Syrian Assassins

Sinan died in 1193 and the succession passed to another eastern Ismaili, Nasr, a Persian. Full relations with Alamut were restored after Sinan's de facto independance. In fact, despite this, the strange antinomian episode (1165-1210) initiated by Hasan who had succeeded his father in the year of Sinan's accession (probably no coincidence) and continued by Muhammad II, had caught on, though Sinan moderated its excesses, and its ending was without incident.

There is little more to say about the Assassins before recounting the events leading to their extinction, except that they seem to have maintained the status quo established by Sinan even after the wiping out of the Alamut regime in 1258, following the Mongols' thorough extermination of the Abbasid Caliphate, with which, during its brief independence, the Assassins had been on good terms. The onslaught of the Mongols on Syria was now impending. Fortunately for the Muslim world, it was ready - just in time.

1250 - 1811: The Mamelukes of Egypt

When Saladin died in 1193, the same year as Sinan, the usual squabbles over the sucession took place, but a satisfactory candidate emerged and the dynasty survived. Its last sultan, a benign one by contemporary accounts, Malik al-Salih, beat off the Last Crusade by St. Louis at Damietta in Egypt (where he was visited by St Francis on a personal peace mission). More importantly for the future, he bought large numbers of male slaves, mainly from the Caucasus, to be trained as soldiers, who became known as Mamelukes, derived from an Arabic word for slave.

1260-1277: Baybars the Mameluke

When Malik al-Shah died, leaving only a baby boy, a Mameluke took over after the usual murder and mayhem. After he was murdered, another, Kotos took over. He was responsible for the great victory of Ain Jalud in 1060 over the Mongols - they never returned - but was in turn murdered by his lieutenent Baybars, who maintained his position for the rest of his life, terminated by his dying in agony in 1277 from poison he had prepared for a victim who craftily switched the drinks.

Baybars received the submission of the Assassins a few years after he came to power and "their skilled services seem to have been, for a short time at his disposal" as Lewis puts it, though the missions had declined from purely the suicidal to high-risk ones, with payment attached: "If the murderer escapes," the famous traveller Ibn Battuta explained, "the money is his; if he is caught, his children get it. Sometimes their plots fail, and they themselves are killed." The sometimes is significant. Prince Edward, the future King of England Edward I, a sort of gap-year Crusader in 1272, almost fell a victim; his death might well have changed the history of the British Isles.

1173: The end of the Assassins

But Baybars, whose life-work was the liberation of the Muslim Near East from the double threat of the Christian Franks [a general term in use for all Western Europeans, and not confined to those of French origin] and the heathen Mongols, could not be expected to tolerate the continued independence of a dangerous pocket of heretics and murderers in the very heart of Syria

Nor could they be trusted, there were enough of them devoted to the old ways to arouse suspicion, justified by a certain amount of evidence that a mission was being organized to assassinate Baybars himself. The last leaders of the Assassins, who after the fall of Alamut in 1158, had been appointed by Baybars, were exiled to Egypt and the remaining castles surrendered. The end came not with a bang but a whimper.

Cultural contrasts between Islam and the West, then and now

Although Western Europe, from Scandinavia to the Atlantic could be regarded as Christianized by 1000AD and Christian beliefs and practices regarded as the social pattern to be aspired if not always adhered to, two fundamental customs, which are not given any biblical sanction, became firmly established. The first was a total ban, for any reason, on suicide. The other, of slower growth, was succession by primogeniture. It might be noted that Orthodox, Byzantine Christianity, to which the Russians converted, supported a suicide ban, but in the period we are dealing with, dynastic succession was less firmly rooted than in the West.

Suicide, permissible and impermissible

The taboo against suicide meant, of course, that there could be no Christian equivalent to the Assassins, or the modern suicide bomber. This taboo was rigorously enforced by the Church (a single unit in Western Europe until the Reformation in the sixteenth century - which made no difference) which equated it with murder and consigned the dead criminal to hell-fire, since he or she had obviously died unrepentant, while the corpse was denied burial in consecrated ground. Whether the doctors of the Church, or the university schoolmen debated the prohibition of suicide is strictly irrelevant: it was fact of life. The Jewish position is probably the same, but this I am not certain of. The only suicides I can think of in the Old Testament are of King Saul and his armour-bearer and Achitophel, whose counsel was rejected by King David. These are recounted with neither approval or disapproval.

The Christian prohibition against suicide survives very strongly even in largely secularised Western societies. Abolition of the law against it has only been achieved in the last few decades and "assisted suicide" is still a controversial matter, far more than abortion. In all other major religions - Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian and Shinto - suicide is a part, a small part admittedly, of the political culture. The Islamic has been demonstrated by the Assassins in the past and the modern suicide bomber in the present, Tamils Tigers are the Hindu element, if we exclude suttee, Buddhists immolate themselves, the Chinese regard (or regarded) suicide as a preferable alternative to public shame and everyone knows about the kamikazis of Japan. Western and Eastern Christian and post-Christians societies denied its legality under any circumstances for almost all of their existence, and they appear to be unique.

Although we can perhaps learn little of use for ourselves from the techniques of the Assassins, perhaps we should remember that they targeted key individuals, and should be aware that the modern Islamic terrorists have not forgotten this and know that it is far from certain that the modern political, democratically elected leader will be replaced, as would have been the Commanders of the military religious orders, with another as tough and dedicated to the work in hand as he was.

Primogeniture: succession made plain

The convention that a man's estate should pass whole to his eldest son and then to that son's eldest son, regardless of other male relatives, who might be older, stronger or wiser, was almost certainly the result of the feudal system, a series of hierarchies, based on land holdings, with the knight the bottom unit, sufficiently supported by his land income to afford armour, horse and retinue, owing direct allegiance to a superior, perhaps a baron, who in turn owed his to an earl, who owed his to the King. It was a system that may have sacrificed a certain degree of military efficiency to certainty of status. Any disputes could be settled by litigation, which tended to strengthen the system, the influence of which may even have worked its way upward, so that Kings, instead of dividing up their possessions to parcel them out among their sons (as William the Conqueror and Henry II did with theirs in England and France), saw the merit of a system that sanctioned their being transmitted in a single package.

It hardly needs pointing out that this system was infinitely preferable to the Islamic one, which entailed a free-for-all amongst those who thought they had a chance of replacing the defunct leader, usually but not always, his sons. The three great Islamic dynasties, the Abbasid, the Mughal and the Ottoman all displayed this in their days of greatness, while the eventual Ottoman solution was almost worse than the disease - to keep the Sultan-in-waiting, together with any potential competitors, sequestered until his accession, so that his ignorance of outside affairs made him unfit to rule. Oddly enough the only exception to the "usual methods" employed in the area to decide on the succession were the Assassins, where the transmission of power seems to have been almost invariably smooth.

An appendix on the Crusades and Crusaders

The era of "apologies" is on us and the late Pope was ignorant enough to apologize to the Muslim world for the Crusades. It would have been more relevant for him to have apologized, if at all, for the contemporary Christian reconquest of Spain (a success) than to have done so for the Crusades (a failure). The Crusades, if properly managed, could have kept the boundary of Christendom fixed as far as the Taurus in Asia Minor, or even the Caucasus. Think how convenient that would have been to the bureaucrats in Brussels, with their headache of negotiating an EU extension to the same boundary! Instead, the Crusaders opened up to the Turks a means of destruction of the Byzantine Empire and conquest almost as far as the gates of Vienna. For this the Papacy does bear a heavy responsibility.

To put the matter briefly, the Crusades should, perhaps could, have been a rescue mission, badly needed by the Byzantines, who wanted a large contingent of fighting men to act under their orders. The Empire had suffered a crushing defeat at Manzikert, near their eastern border, in 1071 by a part of the Turkish invaders who were otherwise busy subduing the (Arab) Middle East, aggression beside which any effort by the Crusaders pales into insignificance. But they became Muslims, so that's all right, isn't it? Unfortunately, rather like the Muslims, the Byzantines tended to solve their succession problems in the same way, though not so brutally, and it wasn't until 1081 that the winner, the Emperor Alexius was firmly on the throne. Relations between the Eastern Orthodox and Western Churches were even worse than usual and it was not until 1095 that he was able to call for help to clear Asia Minor and establish the old boundaries.

Instead of what he wanted (after a rabble of pilgrims had been safely deposited on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, to be slaughtered by the Turks) what arrived at Constantinople was, for its time, a well-organized army, intent, for those with a religious agenda, on "liberating" Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulche, and for those with a more secular one, to sieze land to rule completely independently. Both these objectives were achieved, but what should have been their priority was not. Asia Minor was by-passed and lost and, in due course, the Ottoman Turks, with it as their base, ensured that South Eastern Europe was lost as well for many centuries.

The Architect and His Wife: A Life of Edwin Lutyens
Jane Ridley
Chatto & Windus, 2002

The great grand-daughter of the architect ("Ned" to all) and his wife (Lady Emily Lutyens, nee Lytton) has set herself the quadrangular task of describing the lives of both of them, together with his architecture and her theosophy. Their interests, to which both were strongly bound, conflicted and in others, and probably at other times, would have ensured their separation. But as his letters (The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his Wife Lady Emily, edited by Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley) can attest, much more strongly than this book does, they retained a deep affection for each other, certainly amounting to love initially and at the end of their lives together. "In the last years of his life," wrote Lady Emily, in her autobiography Candles in the Sun, "I like to think that we were closer to each other than we had ever been before." And, penitently, after re-reading their letters two months after his death, she found hers and herself "a revelation of such an odious person, and Father so endlessly sweet and patient." His letters (a superb collection, and a joy to read) certainly bear this out: as far as I know, hers have not been published - perhaps as she would have wished.

Unfortunately their incompatibilities were enormous. Just for a start, neither seemed to have any idea how to make love. Perhaps if Emily had been seduced by Wilfred Scawen Blunt, "a corridor-creeper" as someone characterised him (and got away with it; and, in the circumstances it did seem an amazingly close-run thing - see A Blessed Girl by Lady Emily herself) he might have taught her how to initiate the obviously clumsy virgin Ned. As it was, after the birth of Mary, the youngest child, she refused (by letter) to have any further sexual relations with him. Fortunately, perhaps, they did not live together very much; at first his work took him to sites and clients, South Africa and India, later her theosophy to camps, congresses, India (he had to warn her that if she came when he was there, he'd have to throw up his work) and Australia. The children suffered terribly - or do I exaggerate?

The houses Lutyens bought for the family to live in also sound appalling - one was perennially damp, all were sparsely furnished (bare boards underfoot) and under-heated, if not actually icy. How can I sympathise with an architect who does not care for comfort, for others, let alone for himself and his family? Maybe the Cenotaph and the War Memorials he designed appealed to him as projects because no one had to live in them? In a passage I remember but cannot find, the author states "Lutyens' houses [for his clients] were notoriously uncomfortable" and there are references to draughts, smoky chimneys and inadequately lighted rooms, to say nothing of increased costs over the estimates.

Even "Viceroy's House [in New Delhi] was not an easy or a comfortable house to live in", Ridley admits, p. 402. He paid his office staff the lowest wages in the business and some of them were probably, perhaps because of this, dishonest. His feuding with Herbert Baker, fellow-architect and once his friend, and far more magnanimous in his attitude to Lutyens, was surely excessive. He could never forgive him for "deceiving" him about how the approach road at Delhi would dip so that the view of Viceroy House, with its dome, was sometimes lost. Later, when the project was complete, many judged this did no harm to or even enhanced the effect. Yet, in spite of his defects, Lutyens comes across as an attractive, cheerful (he was always making jokes) and ultimately lovable man. His daughter Mary who wrote her autobiography To Be Young confessed that though she had tried to redress the balance to some extent in favour of her mother, it didn't work.

Somehow the lives of everyone seem more austere, uncomfortable and chaotic than has been the impression given in other biographies by Mary and her mother. The breakthrough of Lutyens himself into success is not made clear, perhaps because he was always bad at managing money and worried about becoming poorer and poorer, like his father, and dying in poverty. Yet by the time he was 30 "he had so much work in Surrey that he spent most of his time there (p. 73)." He seemed to have wanted to build in the local 'vernacular' style, but of course sought clients who desired large houses. Gertrude Jekyll, the legendary garden designer who had, from his first days, been a close friend, collaborated with him and found him many clients (12 out of 20 documented jobs between 1892 and 1896, p. 69) and there were others, Barbara Webb and Betty Balfour, and the Duke of Westminster. At least one house sounds like a disaster, the principal rooms facing the wrong way (p. 70).

It is difficult, of course, to describe architecture, let alone the thought processes that bring it about, without far more illustrations than are possible in a book of this sort and the reader is tacitly referred to other works, particularly Hussey's Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens. Perhaps that is why Lutyens' efforts to get work (one or two bordering on sharp practice) are more obvious because easier to recount. Other features that emerge is his obsession for work, even to the last few days of his life, and linked with it, his painstaking care for detail. His long relationship with Lady Sackville (Macsack) seems to have been a failure architecturally as well as personally.

His achievement in New Delhi was, by contrast, a triumph. It was a paradox that an architect so English should have made something so suitable for India, somehow taking the features of a culture and people he basically thought inferior in order to achieve it. That, at least, is how I see it. Jane Ridley makes the proper anti-racist sounds, but Lutyens was merely a man of his time, nor could the British have ruled India if they had felt anything but superior to the natives and made them feel the same.

By contrast, it is Emily's (and Mrs Besant's) position, now perceived as so conventional, that was remarkable. Society, for all its racism, tolerated her behaviour then more than ours would today would her husband's. Its racist element actually probably made it easier for Emily and Mrs Besant, President of the Theosophical Society (white), to judicially remove Krishna and Nitya from their father (black). Krishna, or Krishnamurti as he became, had been identified as the Theosophical Messiah, a role he repudiated later. As for the sinister 'Bishop' Leadbeater, today he would long ago have been locked up as a paedophile. I expect the Rev. Whitworth Elwin, who had named Emily as "a blessed girl" when a teenager and caressed her by his fireside, while his wife grumbled quietly in a corner, would have been on some sort of police list, too. Such are our more enlightened times.

Ridley makes little attempt to explain what Theosophy was (or is), perhaps thinking (and correctly) that Emily would have found some other weird thing to do. (My apologies to modern Theosophists, whose lifestyle is presumably different, and, I trust, much more comfortable now than then). It is very unlikely that it would have been anything that helped her husband, who took the refusal of his marital rights (as they were then regarded) very hard. Although both Edwin and Emily lived through both World Wars (he died on New Year's Day 1944) neither war is given much prominence - it seems a strange intrusion when one of Edwin's trips to India is menaced by a U-Boat. There is no mention of any of his relatives being lost in either war. Emily's sister Barbie lost three sons in WWII; its effect on Emily's family seems to have been minimal. Only after WWI did it seems to affect Edwin when he served on the War Graves Commission and designed memorials, the Cenotaph being the most famous.

As for his work, strangely his best known did not make money; he waived his fee for the Cenotaph, his beautiful Queen Mary's Dolls' House (scale 1:12, see the almost as beautiful book of the same name, by Mary Stewart-Wilson and David Cripps, photographer), with its multiple collaborators (typically, Bernard Shaw was the only one to refuse to contribute a tiny book to the Royal Library) was a personally inspired (and unpaid) jeu d'esprit and the Viceroy's House didn't bring him a profit. And his (Roman Catholic) Liverpool Cathedral, the design for which he was working on his death-bed, has become an architect's fantasy, never (apart from the crypt) to be built, though a full model of it still exists.

Emily survived Edwin for twenty years, dying at 87 from Alzheimer's. Two years before, her daughter, the composer Elizabeth Lutyens, had taken her on a tour in Surrey, visiting there the houses her husband had designed. But "Have I ever been married?" enquired the bewildered old lady. Tragically, after her death, two of her four daughters committed suicide, but all her children left progeny, though of the twenty two now of the fourth generation, only one male bears the name of Lutyens.

Note: Lutyens is a unique family name (as, I believe, is Guinness), all being descended from Bartold Lutkens, a Hamburg merchant who immigrated to London and was naturalised in 1739, anglicizing his name to Bartholomew Lutyens; Edwin was his great-great grandson and had nine brothers and three sisters. At least three of these survived him, but his daughter remembers that from time to time, her father would don a black suit and top hat to attend the funeral of one of his siblings.

One of them, his second elder brother, John went to India after he joined the Royal Engineers and befriended Kipling, then a cub reporter who later in tribute put him in by name as the hero of the polo match in his story The Maltese Cat: "Why Lutyens? What an odd name," I'd wondered as a boy, long before I'd ever heard of the architect.

Five Lutyens, one of them Edwin's grandfather, fought in the Peninsula, three at the battle of Corunna. Oman, in his History of the Peninsular War, mentions a Captain Lutyens, presumably one of the other two brothers, who, just out to the Peninsula, may (the facts are obscure) have been killed in a disastrous skirmish there.

Another brother, Englebert, had the duty of keeping an eye on Napoleon on St. Helena, which he did with such consideration (against orders) that Napoleon gave him a pair of pistols. Edwin also thrilled his children with the ghoulish story that "Englebert was on duty the night after the post-mortem on Napoleon, guarding his remains, when waking from a doze he was just in time to stop a rat from making off with Napoleon's heart."

"Fought" is perhaps not the quite the correct word to describe the role of another brother, Edwin's grandfather Charles, who was a general in Wellington's commissariat, and left the army a wealthy man. As Ridley puts it, "The administrative offices of the army were notoriously venal and, though in his war diaries he grumbled about dishonesty and graft, it seems unlikely that the shrewd and worldly Charles, as commissary general, neglected altogether the chance of enriching himself."

The Buddha and the Sahibs
Charles Allen
John Murray Publishing, 2003

It came as something of a surprise to me that so much that is now known about the Buddha (the "Wise One", not an exclusive title in his time) seems to have been discovered by Europeans, who, later joined by the Americans, played a large part in the revival of Buddhism in the East, as well as its spreading into the West. It may be a fault in this book that the reader is really left in the dark as to the actual tenets of Buddhism. There have been plenty of investigators eager to claim significance for their discoveries, but their painstaking translations are rarely quoted and Asoka's famous much-carved edict, triumphantly deciphered after 2000 years of incomprehe