MPs' pay: the other metric

MPs and their pay, again. Boring boring.

And I say boring because the debate is so rubbish (though as an issue it is also intrinsically a bit boring). I don't really know where the right compromise is between enough and too much for MPs, but I find our summary of IPSA's logic pretty clear and it looks like they've got it about right, particularly as the overall cost of paying MPs will be flat. I could be persuaded otherwise.

However, what I'm struck by is how the debate totally ignores the rules for how MPs' pay will go up in future - in line with average earnings. This obviously does two things. Firstly it risks their pay getting out of sync again (their benchmarks may go up more or less than average earnings), secondly it gives them an incentive to support changes in the economy that improve average earnings, for which we should be grateful, I suppose.

But it doesn't go far enough. The average here is a median, so what this means is MPs will be judged on how much the person is in the exact middle of the list of earners does. But that's not how I would judge them; and that's not what the rhetoric of both sides is based on. They should be judged on how the worst off do (inter alia, I think making sure the average does up is the best solution to that too). So I would link MPs' pay to the mean average incomes of the poorest (10%; maybe 25%). That's what their real job is; they should be encouraged to do it.

Bibliography, November 2013

BOTM: A. Sisman, Hugh Trevor - Roper

J. Betjeman, Summoned by Bells
T. Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword
M. MacCambridge, America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation
J. Major, My Old Man: a personal history of Music Halls
G. Orwell, Nineteen eighty-four*

What a month! Four of the six books here could have been BOTM in almost any other month. Honestly, by the time I got to Orwell's masterpiece I felt I was on a downward spiral (it would still have comfortably taken prizes in previous months). Honourable mention to MacCambridge's history of American Football, which is essentially perfect, though as a subject not quite up there with Sisman. That wasn't perfect - I felt the seventies were undercooked - but it was brilliant.^ Peter Brown once described PhDs in Late Antiquity as choosing your bishop. Perhaps more modern biographers should choose their academic. In both cases, it's a fantastic way to hang a history of a period and a world, especially if, like HTR, they knew everybody. It's also a great triumph of taking a world which now feels very remote, though with familiar contours, and making it immediate. Finally, of course, it immaculately allows us into HTR's own head - and that's compelling. Sisman also writes excellently, with some lovely barbs hidden in the text. This was a favourite.^^ 

^I should of course disclose a more personal reason for finding this all fascinating: as well as being a Christ Church man, HTR was also my MSt supervisor's stepfather. He makes the odd appearance, very sympathetically too.

^^I did in fact have lots of markers of wonderful gobbets to quote, but the child took them all out, despite being supervised by A at the time.

Bibliography, October 2013

BOTM: A. Munro, Runaway

G.K. Chesterton, The Man who was Thursday 
R. Ellison, Invisible Man 

R. Mathiessen, The snow leopard 
A. Munro, Open Secrets 

J. Wyndham, The Chrysalids 

Disastrously, I've not updated this for weeks. Doubtless, everyone is on tenterhooks. I feel they may be disappointed. There are certainly few surprises in the selection - broadly, if you win the Nobel in English and aren't Pinter I'm going to aim to read you - soon. In this case, it was even easier as Anna already had these two Munros. And they were great, for the reasons the Nobel committee gave (bizarrely hard to find on their site, summarised externally). I'd also add what Jonathan Franzen wrote in my introduction to Runaway which is also her surprises - just as you think you've reached the point of a story, the perspective shifts. It's brilliant stuff. To be honest, which one was BOTM is a bit arbitrary, and the winner may have shaded it simply on the fact I read it first. It's clearly a canon I'm going to have read more of. Everyone should.

Bibliography, September 2013

BOTM: A. Patchett, Run

T. Harford, The undercover economist
N. Hawthorne, The house of seven gables
W. Horwood, Duncton Wood*
C. Smith, The Rediscovery of man
D. Swann, Swann's way out

I meant to read Ellison's Invisible Man this month, but I moved house instead and didn't get round to it. I'm sure it's excellent. Many of the books on this list aren't. Swann's book is silly; Hawthorne and Harford slight and while I love the Duncton trilogy, it is ultimately a fantasy trilogy about moles with most of the plot drawn from the Bible. However, Run was a deserving BOTM. It's been sitting on our shelves for ages (it's Anna's, so not included in my reading all my books), and I read it solely because it was set in Boston. There are lots of things to like about it, not least the simplicity of the concept. You can certainly easily imagine the pitch for the novel. I suspect I'm currently pretty susceptible to novels about parenthood, but this was a great one, despite it's really obvious setup. Anyway, what I liked was that despite the really obvious setup, it was full of lovely byways and really well done other bits, around politics, religion and, indeed, fish (read: obsessions). Good end too.

Tax does actually have to be taxing

In case you were in any doubt about the value of the Liberals, here they come with a plastic bag tax that isn't even a plastic bag tax. I'm objecting here not on the issue of whether we should have a plastic bag tax - I don't really see why not, but that's not the point - but the muddled and dangerous thinking behind the idea of a compulsory levy that doesn't go to government (as per the system in Wales). It's awful, in principle and in practice.

I think we can quickly attend to one half of the problem. Donating the money to a good cause is optional. Therefore, if they choose supermarkets can net additional profits by keeping the money. It's an odd (and badly designed) sin tax that incentivises those charging it to sell more. We wouldn't suggest that the markup on cigarettes was kept by the tobacco companies. Luckily, public and political pressure will mean that all the big firms will pass it on to charity. That's almost worse.

And there are two big reasons why:

• It suggests charity is a better use of money than government spending. It isn't: it's not universal; it's not monitored; it's not accountable and it's not capable of the large scale planning and investment that government does. I know we do it for gift aid, but that's for additional voluntary giving. This is compulsory. This matters: once you start attacking the principle that taxes go to government for government to allocate, it's not clear why you have government at all. 
• Worse, it also suggests a direct link link between a single tax and an area of spending. That's not what taxes are for (Nota Bene, people who bang on about 'road' tax). Fiscal policy is set to do two things: raise money (this won't) and influence behaviour (this will, pace tobacco). It's muddleheaded thinking to link this to spending priorities. That's just a waste of money simultaneously leading to a downward spiral of decay for poor places and unfashionable causes. Governments must allocate spending where we need it, not based on where they raise it. 

In the end this particular element doesn't matter very much, and not just because it's a Liberal policy. It's not pointless (it will shift behaviour in probably a positive way); it's not very much money (especially if it works). It's just an unnecessary signal in the wrong direction and symptomatic of the weakness of political thought. 

Anathema.

Bibliography, August 2013

BOTM: J. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom

W. Cather, O Pioneers
A. Christie, Lord Edgeware dies
A. Christie, Dumb witness
G. Greene, The Comedians
L.P. Hartley, The Boat 

J. Lees-Milne, Ancient as the Hills*

Honourable mentions all round this month. I'm loving Willa Cather at the moment, Greene was moving and excellent, while Hartley is repaying investment outside his big hit. I was also tempted to give BOTM to Lees-Milne, whose diaries remain exquisite, ten years after I read them the first time round. However, McPherson was pretty much perfect. Obviously, I don't know much about the American Civil War (or the second American civil war as I think we should call it), but it is a major - and salutary - topic. My host in the States was of the view it's far more important than the revolution in understanding the country and I think he might be right. This treatment was as engrossing as it is economical (here defined as getting it in to one volume). Buy it; read it.

Bibliography, July 2013

BOTM: G. Orwell, Coming up for air

M. Atwood, In other worlds: SF and the human imagination
A. Christie, A pocket full of Rye
J. Crace, Quarantine
R. Gunesekera, Reef
Y. Martel, Life of Pi*

W.S. Maugham, Of Human Bondage
G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

G. Orwell, Animal Farm*
A. Trollope, Lady Anna

I was briefly worried that I'd struggle to get through Lady Anna and thus put my 'two new Trollopes a year' plan under threat. But no - 17 Trollope novels read; estimated completion of corpus still due for 2028. Similarly, I was starting to be concerned I might not make it through Orwell this year. But no - three Orwell books read this month alone; one more novel and some essays to go. Unlike Trollope, Orwell also provided BOTM. On reputation it should be Animal Farm, but it doesn't really repay rereading (unlike Life of Pi which really did). Coming up for Air I suspect will. It's quite unlike any of his previous novels (which are essentially social commentary masquerading as fiction; whereas this is history masquerading as fiction), and it's a masterly evocation of the Edwardian, pre-war, age. It's particularly haunting given its prescience about the second war, and the end is brave, and very un-Trollopian in its approach to tying up loose ends. A great, and neglected, book.

Bibliography, June 2013

BOTM: R. Young, Electric Eden

J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World*
A. Christie, Third Girl
J. Harding, Alpha Dogs
C. Louvin, Satan is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin brothers
N. Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
S. Owen, The Rice Book
S. Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
N. Silver, The Signal and the Noise

Tricky month this for BOTM. Literary credibility would make me put down Mailer (though neither Anna nor my parents had ever heard of it); career enhancement (because I am sure my incoming Director reads this), would require me to name Alpha Dogs; and a general sense of being a la mode would say Silver. They were all good, especially Silver, but it didn't quite have enough politics in it for my liking. So BOTM is for Young's hefty tome on English Folk-rock.  It wasn't without flaws - too long (they always are), a slightly confused chronological approach in the middle sections and a lack of reference tables (I could have done with one just to keep track of the member of Fairport Convention) - but it was a great read, with a lovely turn of phrase (of which I've highlighted elsewhere my favourite). I'm off to buy the works of Mr Fox [actually this is surprisingly hard].

Bibliography, May 2013

BOTM: M. Gellhorn, The Weather in Africa

L. Beukes, Zoo City
A. Christie, Taken at the flood
J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
F.S. Fitzgerald, The Basil and Josephine stories
G. Garcia Marquez, Chronicle of a death foretold
D. Lodge, Paradise News
G. Orwell, The road to Wigan Pier*
P. Theroux, Sailing through China
P.G. Wodehouse, A Pelican at Blandings

Some reputations suffered this month. The Ginger Man is a classic, but by God it's dated; I love Fitzgerald, but these stories were ropey. And though Orwell's reportage is excellent, his prescription lamentable, and though not the only criterion on which it should be judged, manages to be wrong on just about every prediction of what would happen to Britain.

That still left me a decent selection, of which Garcia Marquez was was outstanding and well worth the (very short) read, but Gellhorn's triptych the best. I generally find Africa boring, but this was a compelling sequence of stories, only notionally linked, which vividly brought it into focus. There's a nice little introduction where her writing style was discussed, and in particular her approach to fiction, which largely seems to have been writing, cutting and cutting some more. And I think that shone through - there's no spare fat on them; it makes them extraordinarily compelling reading.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Dead, Dead, Dead! (II) Historiography

I meant to do this a fortnight ago, just after my reflection on the Thatcher legacy. But even more interesting  is the context in which that debate happened. To me, the unnoticed story of the coverage was that this was really a debate about the 1970s. Because what you think of Thatcher is really about what you think about the decade before her. If you think that we were on our knees in 1979, Go Maggie; if you think we would have sorted it out given time, Go Foot (or something like that). It’s no surprise that this debate would have been made better by context. Sadly, it was done stunningly badly.

In particular, no-one knows any figures. I've lost count of the times someone appeared and lamented that she destroyed manufacturing. Helpfully, the Guardian did some nice data which tells us that industry was 34% of output in 1990. Incidentally, we also still had 4.5m council houses (20% down on 1979, but hardly a wholesale sell-off). There are plenty of figures to show Thatcherite failure (both those may be seen to be failures depending on your position), but saying untrue things makes you look stupid.

On reflection, it's not true that no-one knows any figures. A number of people know one figure. If you're smart, like Ken Livingstone has been, you bang on about it - conveniently forgetting everything else. Every time the erstwhile mayor has been on anywhere, he's talked about the fall in levels of investment. He's right, it's fallen too low, but there was other stuff going on you know. I'm reminded of when I went to Baltimore and the Americans discussed how they 'won' the War of 1812 or at least got away with a good draw, neglecting to mention that a) we burnt the White House to the ground and b) we were a bit busy with this French chap (just in case) nearer to home. Focusing on one thing to the exclusion of the rest is irrelevant really. It's like a referendum - i.e., bad, and stupid.

But although this lack of figures isn't helpful, it's not the biggest problem. That was both sides going overboard on the polemic, because they can't do counterfactuals properly. On the right, we started talking about her saving the country. The left simply ignored the state of the political and economic landscape in 1979. Neither will do. She didn't save the country. This is a nonsense which does no-one any favours. North Sea oil would still have come in; the ability of, for example, France to come through 1980s, without major market reform suggests that, even in decline, we’d have been alright. I’m pretty convinced we would have been worse off, but Callaghan wasn't a Bennite. On the other hand, it's no good saying that Britain in 1979 wasn't in real trouble; or that Labour would have fixed the unions in a nice way, or indeed at all. Industrial strife had been a characteristic of the entire preceding decade. It's preposterous to suggest that it could have been addressed easily. Similarly, privatisation: no-one really thinks the state should own BA, BT and BP, yet Labour's 1987 manifesto still advocated bringing them back into state hands. And I think would have done regardless of 1979.

I find this lack of contextual sensitivity a bit depressing. It's ahistorical. It polarises opinion around abstract positions that aren't rooted in reality. It judges people against ideal standards which no-one will ever fulfil. And it doesn't help assess the record. In this case, it means Thatcher isn't judged by the reality of the situation in 1979, but rather some kind of theoretical face-off between left and right. And that's pointless. History judges records, and since the late nineteenth century, we've tried not to judge things outside the context of their time. With Thatcher, despite it being a few decades ago, we've failed that basic test.

Bibliography, April 2013

BOTM: J. Crace, The Devil's larder

B. Chatwin, Utz
A. Christie, Elephants can remember
A. Christie, After the Funeral
P. Druckerman, French children don't throw food
W. Faulkner, The Unvanquished
G. Orwell, A clergyman's daughter
G. Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra flying
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The crack-up, with other pieces and stories
A. Tyler, The tin can tree

I almost gave this to a number of 

these, particularly The Unvanquished, not least because the blurb on the back rather coyly refers to it as 'Faulkner's least difficult novel', which would come as a surprise to anyone who started with it. I'm not even sure that Crace was the best of the lot. However, it was different: lyrical,  sinuous, with a waspish sense of fun. It wasn't difficult either. It makes for an very enjoyable evening. I've had him on my list for a while; this chance purchase in a discount bookshop confirmed I was right to. I'm off to buy some more of his.

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie! Dead, Dead, Dead! (I) History

Now the dust has settled, I thought I'd do a reckoning. This is in two parts, with one on the historiographical issues to follow. The title, by the way, is what they chanted in Brixton on the night. I thought it was funny, though I don't doubt the people were being objectionable. Even A thinks it's all rather distasteful, but I think we can rise above that.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about Thatcher. She's a Tory icon; I'm a Tory etc. But I'm a big wet, old fashioned Tory, firmly on the Heseltine - Clarke axis in the party, the one that doesn't really exist any more (see this mediocre article on the subject). I'm pro-European, pro-state, I even think we should have an industrial policy. She would have purged me from any cabinet she had. Some of her policies leave me cold, some of her legacy even more so. Nonetheless, she was, in her words, one of us. And she did many more of the right things than the wrong things. Better modern historians and politics students will argue the detail better than I can, but below is my personal ledger, why I would happily have voted for her every time, and why I think she was good for us.

Let's do some big wins:

• Unions, clipping the wings thereof. It's now fashionable (in certain circles) to say that this would have happened anyway. I find this annoying and disingenuous. Unions had been the undoing of the previous two governments, possibly three if you count 1969/70. To dismiss it as inevitable is bad history and wishful thinking. The Unions we had through the 1970s were destructive and disastrous. I'm glad we don't have overpowerful trade unions, closed shops and strikes without elections. Well done Maggie.
• Privatisation. When I'm feeling cruel, I like to bait the ignorant left. It's an amusing game. In particular I like to list companies and ask them how many should be renationalised. I could go on for hours, but they usually cave after BA, BP, Jaguar and BT, and this was before I discovered Pickfords was also on that list. There is no doubt that rail hasn't worked (not Thatcher), but overall, it's a rebalancing that was overdue. And no-one here, or in most of the west, would go back.
• Deregulation. Now, I won't have this simplistic, 'sowed the seeds of the crash' nonsense. Regulation is a balancing act. Take finance, over-regulated in 1979, under-regulated in 2008. Thatcher moved in the right direction.
• The Falklands. This was obviously right, and no other candidate for power would have done it.
• The Cold War. We wouldn't be having this debate with the Czechs and the Poles.

What's characterised this debate since her death is the total absence of recognition of the bad ones on our side. Let's do those too:

• Grammar schools. If nothing else, this stands against her. Appalling educational vandalism. A caving in to the teaching profession that damaged educational standards and social mobility and led to greater middle-class segregation at the same time, which is an impressive feat. Not all Thatcher, but she was supine when she should have been steadfast.
• Monetarism. It didn't really work, and even Thatcher et al resiled from it pretty quickly.
• Industrial policy. We should have had one, and we should have used it to help the provinces. Actually there was an industrial policy, in Liverpool thanks to Hezza, and, er, Canary Wharf, but there should have been more. 
• The Gays. I know, I know.

I would have liked her to be different, but I would rather have had her than any other option around (and to govern is to choose). I'm not interested in whether she was a nice person (Lloyd George wasn't). I'm not interested how you think the 1990s should have played out (she wasn't there). I'm not interested what you think she would have done if she had stayed in power longer (she didn't). I'm interested in the record, and, overall, it's a win. 

By the way, I hope this stays up.

Choosing a church (2): The word of God

I listened to parodies of preaching before I actually went to church enough to remember the preaching - to this day, I can't hear about Jacob and Esau without, unbidden, Alan Bennett's pastiche rising to mind (text here, even better if you can find the delivery). This is particularly true because some of the sermons in my parents' church were reminiscent of this approach (still are). Thankfully, where I go now, they're not. 

In fact, I've been fortunate to have a succession of good, and different, preachers at St Michael's. The depth is important because it's exposed me to a variety of tone, which not only reduces the burden on the rector, but also relieves the audience. Elsewhere, things have been mixed. One of my recent local experiments was excellent - he did a short exegesis of the gospel text as his sermon. Others have been considerable less memorable. Some have been terrible, though none have plumbed the depths of St Giles, Camberwell, where some years ago, the priest floated the possibility that the four beasts of the apocalypse of Daniel might be interpreted as modern day figures of evil - "Hitler, Stalin, Mao ... and Thatcher," without a hint of irony. I never went again.

It's obvious why this is important, but here my five point guide to what I want from a sermon, aside from standard public speaking drill - be intelligible, speak, don't read etc:

• Substance. Say something. This is not Thought for the Day. Everyone wants to be here. They know being nice is a good thing. Ditto Jesus loves us. Something more pointed and more material is called for. 
• Scripture. However, this is not an opportunity to regurgitate some thoughts you've been having about contemporary issues based on yesterday's Guardian. Root it in the scripture you've just read. And that's all the scripture, not just the gospel. The other two readings aren't just there for decoration. 
• Focus. Wide ranging sermons lose the congregation, and usually the preacher. Given you get to do this every week, best to stick to one message. It also means you can do it justice.
• Personality. Be careful here, as overpersonal interpretations can simply be a mess, but everything goes better if preachers preach about the things they want to say, rather than things they think they ought to be talking about. Also: if you can't do Greek, don't talk about it. Don't do it badly.
• Brevity. Most importantly, don't go on. I don't have a strict time limit in mind here, but anything longer than ten minutes should be looked at hard. It's probably not worth it.

It's actually not that hard. It's astonishing how many vicars fail.

Bibliography, March 2013

BOTM : G. Orwell, Burmese Days

P. Anderson, The broken sword
C. Dexter, Last bus to Woodstock
N. Ferguson (ed.), Virtual History
I. Fleming, Casino Royale
A. Mahler - Werfel, Diaries 1898 - 1902 
G. Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
C. Ricks, Dylan's Visions of Sin
P.G. Wodehouse, Galahad at Blandings
T. Wynette, Stand by your man

I'm  (re)reading Orwell this year. Specifically, all of the full length works - there are nine - in order. It's going pretty well. Nor was it a surprise to me that he tops this month's list. Though I did enjoy Alma Mahler-Groupius-Werfel's diaries, despite buying them as a joke (here for background). Anyway, both Orwells excellent, though in both I had to remind myself forcefully that he wasn't known then, which particularly changes the complexion of Down and Out. Overall though, Burmese Days the better of the two. More substantial, and hugely resonant as well as influential on modern Empire-lit (I kept noticing the foreshadowing of Burgess' Malayan trilogy). Also, a pretty good plot, though I'm not sure about the ending.

Choosing a church (1): No more Peace

We're thinking of moving house to accommodate the child and my expanding bookshelves. As a consequence (of the child) we need to start thinking about schools, and as a consequence of that, I need to think about churches. Specifically, I need to think about churches that have good schools attached. As a result, I've been going to some churches in areas we might move to - this has not proved an entirely happy experience. So I though I'd start to jot down some rough criteria for churches in a series of posts. This one is going to talk about the Peace. For the avoidance of doubt, while I will do a great deal for the child, I will not go to churches whose main liturgical instrument is the guitar, and nor will I regularly attend a service led by someone not in clerical dress and who believes Jesus would like us all to clap more. All of what follows therefore assumes a church that is at lease middle of the road CofE and ideally a little higher. So far, I've avoided accidentally going to churches that spend too much time with tambourines.

Nonetheless, in all of them, bar none (and I realise now my church is guilty of this too), the Peace is excruciatingly awful. I've a number of objections to it, but at heart the issue is that it simply goes on far, far too long. I've not timed it, that's hard to do surreptitiously, but it exceeds my ideal by a significant multiple. The ideal length of time for the Peace, if any time must be allocated at all, it the time it takes to shake hands with your immediate neighbours, of whom there will be no more than six, allowing 4-5 seconds per person (and it doesn't take that long usually), you should have the whole thing done in half a minute. That could easily be shorter. Instead, it goes on and on, people come over from other parts of the church to say hello to friends, priests wander in your direction, especially if they've noticed the new person who looks young. And I try to look the other way, or read the hymnbook. Once, anticipating this grimness, I stood by a noticeboard and read there entire presentation about the local school. The Peace was still going on when I finished.

As well as being excruciatingly embarrassing, I also think it's unsound. There's a nice theological reflection on this here, which I found with a cursory google and broadly agree with. But I most profoundly disagree with it because it cheapen the church community. One of the great glories of the parish church is that is genuinely does forge community out of unlikely ingredients. What has masked the awfulness of the Peace in my church is that I do know most people; and so it's not an unpleasant experience to shake their hands in the middle of the service. Nonetheless it's a false bonhomie, a formalised handshake isn't real engagement, but it looks a bit like it, especially if you remember the other person's name. It's quick. formulaic and shallow. In reality and overlong Peace betrays a lack of community - if we were bound together properly, even a little, you'd do all this over coffee afterwards or even outside the service, not pretend to chat in a messy Peace.. Now real engagement has happened in all the churches I've been too, though not always in a way that pulls newcomers in. In which case, the Peace isn't only painful, it's pointless. Cut it down, or better still, leave out the audience interaction altogether. I'm looking (in vain) for the church that does that.

Bring back Paul III

As the cardinal-electors gather in Rome, doubtless trying to consider the challenges of the modern world, I suggest they should instead be thinking about the past, and the character of the great popes of history. There's a nice looking book on some obvious candidates, though I've not read it and would have a less  modern list. It does, however, include my absolute favourite Pope, Paul III (1534-49). And I think the cardinals would do well to consider his example.

Granted, there are some difficult elements in Paul's biography. It's doubtful he was very devout, as he delayed his ordination well into his church career, which he probably owed to his sister's relationship to the Borgia pope. He had numerous illegitimate children. For whom he carved out careers and titles for them at the expense of the papal patrimony. He made his 14 year old grandson a cardinal. Nor was the external situation he inherited promising. At his accession, the reformation was gaining traction across Germany, England had gone over the divorce, and only seven years before, his staunchest 'ally' had led an army into Italy that sacked Rome itself. 

By the time he died though, the catholic church was back. It took longer than his fifteen year reign to remodel the church, but the foundations were all laid under Paul: the Council of Trent was called, the Curia subject to proper scrutiny, the Jesuits founded, some nice art commissioned, and the work on improving the quality of priests begun. All these were to prove difficult, the latter so much so that Paul IV (1555-59) resorted to condemning errant monks to the galleys. Nonetheless, in 1534, the church chose a politician, a leader, and an administrator rather than a saint or a theologian, and it has many reasons to be thankful it did.

Were I catholic, and a cardinal, I would be looking to find the modern equivalent of Paul III.

Bibliography, February 2013

BOTM: M. Atwood, The Blind Assassin

R. Blake, The Blood of Alexandria
S.C. Gwynne, Empire of the Summer Moon
W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale
J.R.R. Tolkein, The Silmarillion*
A. Zamoyski, Rites of Peace

It's been a great month for quality, if not quantity. Four of the six books here would have been contenders for BOTM at another time. Gwynne's account of the Commanche was lively and engrossing, though didn't always live up to its own rhetoric. Zamoyski on the Congress of Vienna is a great excavation of a very complex moment in history, which also alerted me to the fact the Kissinger's doctoral thesis was on the same subject. I'm surprised I've never read Maugham before, but Cakes and Ale was brilliant, waspish, and very nicely done, if a little slight. However, all were worse than Atwood's Booker winner. I've not always gotten on with Atwood. I thought the Handmaids Tale clumsy and boring, while I found some of her earlier books unreadable. This is a masterpiece. Despite being very obviously literary in construction - it's a book with a book inside it which itself has a book inside it - it's compelling, magisterially written and still manages a good twist (or two) at the end. A triumph.

The other Presley

When Andover-born Reginald Hall was searching for a stage name, he opted for one that looked very much like delusions of grandeur. He didn't care - and Reg Presley and the Troggs were born. He died yesterday and I've been playing them all morning. In truth, there are only five tracks that have stood the test of time, but what tracks. A world without Wild thing, With a girl like you, Any way that you want me, I can't control myself (all 1966) and Love is all around (1968) would be a much poorer one.

A world without Reg Presley would have been a much poorer one too. Despite his lack of chart success since 1968, he and the Troggs played on for the following four decades - only his final ill health ending it last year. Along the way his songs burst occasionally into public consciousness, Wet Wet Wet's version of Love is all around making him a fortune in the 1990s. He was also a proper eccentric, in a fine English tradition. Obsessed with UFOs, he spent the money he made on researching them, published here. There aren't many people who connect Jimi Hendrix (who also covered Wild Thing) with standing around in wet English fields looking at crop circles. Reg Presley may even be unique in this respect.

In the obituaries, he was called a 'very real person in a sometimes very unreal world.' That's a fine tribute, and a very fine one for a pop star. We should have more people like him, and now we've one fewer. Farewell.

The 20 best glam-rock songs of all time

Last week, the Guardian published a list of the top 20 glam rock songs of all time, as their response to the Tate Liverpool exhibition on the subject. I have at least four objections to it. Firstly, and this is only a quibble, the exhibition (and this list) only run to music between 1971 and 1975 so 'all time' doesn't really fit in. Secondly, it doesn't include anything by Gary Glitter because he's a paedophile. Some people have questioned the merit of Glitter's music, but I suspect that's not behind the exclusion of the electrifying Rock and Roll (part 2), rather this is therefore the best Glam songs not by someone convicted of interfering with children. Thirdly, nor does it include anything by Wizzard, ABBA (has no-one seen the Waterloo video?) or even the Bay City Rollers. (I retain my oft stated view that Bye Bye Baby, which is a song about the importance of marriage and helpless love, is far better and deeper than it's ever given credit for. I make no such claim for Shang-a-Lang). Finally, in an attempt to make Glam cool (which it isn't) they've added lots of more credible tracks in. I love Transformer from which Vicious is taken, but it's not a Glam album. 

So it's also a terrible list. I've made a better one below. This site also great, though I disagree about where they put the credibility line. Where relevant, I've put the Observer ranking in brackets and therefore have dropped off about half of their list  - in part for the reasons outlined above, but also because some of the choices are just wrong. For example choosing Bowie's Queen Bitch above Starman smacks of trying too hard. Anyway:

1. David Bowie, The Jean Genie [7]
2. Sparks, This Town ain't big enough for both of us [17]
3. Wizzard, Angel Fingers (A Teen ballad)
4. Roxy Music, Virginia Plain [4]
5. David Bowie, Starman 
6. Slade, Coz I Luv You 
7. Mud, Rocket 
8. ABBA, Waterloo. 
9. Alice Cooper, School's Out [3]
10. Slade, Cum on Feel the Noize [8]
11. T Rex, Children of the Revolution 
12. David Bowie, Suffragette city
13. T Rex, Get it On [11]
14. Sweet, Blockbuster [14]
15. David Bowie, Rebel Rebel [18]
16. The Bay City Rollers, Bye bye baby
17. Gary Glitter, Rock and Roll part 2
18. David Bowie, John, I'm only dancing
19. Alice Cooper, Elected
20. Alvin Stardust, My Coo-Ca-choo 

Near misses for Chicory Tip, Son of my father and Roxy Music, Do the Strand. Note I've excluded anything by Queen or Elton John for the sake of definitional ease. And I've also excluded the two major Christmas classics by Slade and Wizzard. They would chart highly.

Bibliography, January 2013

BOTM: D. Athill, Instead of a letter (K)

J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit*
R. Blake, Conspiracies of Rome 
R. Blake, Terrors of Constantinople
G. Eliot, Silly novels by Lady novelists

I read most of these in the first half of the month, and have added only one in the last fortnight. I'm not sure quite why. Last week I read several editions of Foreign Affairs but I don't count periodicals as part of this. Anyway, much was fun, I was struck by the total unsuitability of The Hobbit for three films, and the best was Athill's 1960s memoir. Frank, with a good helping of nostalgia and a nice style. It was also a total bargain on the kindle. I'll buy the rest of hers now.

Just Say Gnome!

In 1990, during his Sound + Vision tour, David Bowie invited fans to vote for what he should play. Inevitably, someone ran a campaign to get one of his 'embarrassing' early works, The Laughing Gnome, on the list. Voting was then scrapped in what I think was a regrettable lack of a sense of humour (an unusual one, look at this) and of proportion.

A similar lack of proportion, though in reverse, seems to have attended the publicity-explosion of the last few 

weeks about the surprise release of where are we now. I mean, it's fine, isn't it? I just don't think it merits the reception it's gotten. And nor is this the first time this has happened: in fact everything that Bowie has put out since at least 1999, when everyone said Hours sounded like Hunky Dory, which it doesn't, has had the same treatment. Perhaps everyone's just so relieved it's not Tin Machine again. That's a shame, because it diminishes the original achievements in his golden period running from 1970 to 1983 (you can dispute both ends). It's not that the recent albums aren't bad, many tracks are good, they just lack the sense of risk, innovation and plain madness that characterised him at his pomp (and indeed afterwards, I'm no fan of Earthlings, but it shows the same restlessness). It's certainly true that since 1999 he's eliminated the tendency to put out something awful, but it comes at a price - he's lost that sense of adventure. Not surprising for a man in his sixties. 

But in his pomp, he was extraordinary. He released more than an album a year in the 1970s (useful list here). And all of them (Pin Ups aside) are great, and different. To have followed it at the time must have been amazing, even in retrospect, it's jarring, but exciting. Above I noted that Hours doesn't sound like Hunky Dory, that's because nothing sounds like Hunky Dory - it's a odd, affected record, but it's brilliant, packed full of gems as well as the classics. I remember getting it, it was one of my CDs and it unlocked Pop for me. I then bought most of the rest. You can take your pick, but I'd single out Ziggy Stardust, Station to Station and Diamond Dogs as the best. At one point over 40% of my CD collection was Bowie. 

Anyway, there's a nice retrospective here (hat tip to Elliot), though it misses out The Laughing Gnome.

An elegy for lost data

Notoriously, I have a database of my friends. Specifically, I have a small spreadsheet on which I record my core friends - about 50 of them - and various facts, including how often I see them. I also have spreadsheets that record in detail a variety of other things, including my books and reading. No-one really remembers them though. Now, they are all gone - or at least 2012 is - as I put them memory stick on which they reside in the washing machine. The data for 2012 is lost. I was, and am, very upset about this. A doesn't really understand why.

Now I've had these for about ten years, maybe a bit more. I started them for quite prosaic reasons. I built a list of books because at the time most of my books were still at my parents' house and I didn't want to buy duplicates. I started recording presents when I bought the same thing for the same person two years in a row. I built the Friends database to win an argument over how many of my friends were Tories - less than half as it happens. But I've kept them because they're useful, and interesting. They've expanded in function of course. It was the Books DB that told me I'd not read about 15% of the books in the house, and so I read them. It's the Friends DB that means I don't forget to catch up with people who aren't front of mind. A record of what I cook, and where, from means I could throw out half my cookbooks last year, and forced me to discover more in those I kept. There's more, minor (I also recorded when people first met JR on the Friends DB) and major (the Books DB also records reading levels, allowing me to note the catastrophic baby-induced collapse in volume). I'll now never have that information for 2012.

But the loss I feel is bigger than that - I feel like I have lost part of my past. Without the data, I'm forced to rely on my perception of what happened, and perception is irredeemably faulty, unsystematic and unreliable, and just plain wrong. We know this - that's why we write things down, it's why we take photographs. For me, the information in those spreadsheets was part of my narrative of my past. The information contained allowed me, quickly, to access accurately the past. I'm not making any great claim for the information they held as a record of my life, but they captured part of it, and with ten years of data, they were compelling. And now they are gone. I can replicate some of the information, but not much, and though I've only lost one year, the sequence is broken and the data will always be incomplete. So will the narrative they supported.

I mourn.

Bibliography, 2012

End of the year time. Here were my books of the month:

January - A. Burgess, Earthly Powers* 
February - J. Le Carre, The honourable schoolboy
March - D.L. Sayers, Gaudy night 
April - M. Lewis, Moneyball 
May - Duflo & Bannerjee, Poor economics 
June - T.Penn, Winter King 
July - P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime
August - P. Krugman, End this depression Now
September - C. McCullers, The Heart is a lonely hunter
October - L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians 
November - P.G. Wodehouse, Service with a smile
December - A. Spiegelman, Maus

It almost doesn't need saying that this has been a terrible year for reading. In the previous seven years, I've chalked up an average of 127 books; this year it was 85, and while I don't have a lightweight percentage to hand, it would be higher than ever before. There's certainly more fiction - 64/85 or 75% - though this hasn't really shown up in the BOTMs, which fell 50:50. One minor upside, it did make Books of the Year easier to pick. Too many months had only good rather than great books as their best.

In fact, if you'd shown me the list in advance I could probably have guessed fiction this time last year. I loved Earthy Powers eight years ago, and I loved it again this time. Like other monumental works, it repays rereading as while the shape remains constant, one's engagement with the characters and the issues changes over time - Carlo seems much more fragile, and more flawed than he did in 2004. Regardless, it's a magnificent book, and I'm already looking forward to rereading it in about 2020.

Non-fiction was a surprise, though it shouldn't have been. Non-fiction was better as a whole than fiction despite its low numbers. But, excellent though Penn was, nothing could touch Eminent Victorians. I suspect if I'd read it at 18, I'd have taken more modern papers at university. And, by implication, fewer Byzantine ones. I can think of no greater praise than that.

Bibliography, December 2012

BOTM: A. Spiegelman, Maus

A. Christie, Crooked House*
A. Christie, Hallowe'en Party
A. Christie, Sad Cypress
P. O'Donnell, Modesty Blaize
S. Maconie, Pies and prejudice
S. Richardson, Clarissa (vol 1)

Some years ago, someone told me that Clarissa revolutionised their view of English Literature (they either went on to do or were doing a English Literature degree at the time, which may have been a warning sign). Given it's free on the Kindle I thought I'd try it. I have failed - it is turgid in the extreme and I only got to end of volume one (of four) and that took serious effort. Perhaps as a result, everything else has been a bit lightweight. I almost gave BOTM to Modesty Blaize, which I read on the strength of listening to it serialised on Woman's Hour when I was ill the week before Christmas. but it was flimsy, if great fun. Maus however was a cut above. In some ways it's a bit flimsy too. There are certainly better Holocaust books (and there the obvious ones), but there's an immediacy that the comic form brings that works well.