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.