Bibliography, November 2008

Bought / recieved (17)
R. Benaud, My spin on cricket
M. Bywater, Big Babies
W. Goldman, The princess Bride
N. Gordimer, Writing and being
S. Jordison, The joy of Sects
D. Lessing, Shikastra
S. Leys, The wreck of the Batavia
D. Lodge, Small World
A. Powell, The Valley of Bones
A. Powell, The Soldier's Art
A. Powell, The Military philosophers
A. Powell, Books do furnish a room
A. Powell, Temporary Kings
A. Powell, Hearing secret harmonies
C. Rossant, Return to Paris
J. Tiptree, Her smoke rose up together
S.J. Taylor, The reluctant Press Lord

Books read
I. Asimov, Foundation
S. Brook, The double eagle
A. Cobban, A history of modern France, vol. 2.1799-1871
T. Heyendahl, The Ra expeditions
D. Lessing, Shikastra
D. Lodge, Small World
A. Powell, The Acceptance world
I. Szerb, The Pendragon legend
M. Tully, India in slow motion

I'm really failing in my ability to make inroads into the unread pile, but it is worth noting that nine of them were Powell, and they were due to be bough in the next six months anyway.

BOTM was The Pendragon legend, which was lent to me by a friend of Anna's who, gloriously, is more anal than me about books and inscribes in them his name and date of acquisition. Anyway, it's very easy to read, rolls along excitingly, and really shows up all the more modern (it was written in the 1930s) grail and secret history novels.

Let's not piss about

The arrest of Damian Green is outrageous. I never advocate the reining in of policemen by elected officals, but it might be time for some guidelines. This just should not happen. The government is either lying or had buggered up its chain of communication (I suspect the latter) and needs to fix it. At least there has been outrage across the spectrum.

However, can we get some proportion. It's important not to start banging on about Zimbabwe at this time, as it makes you look silly.

Doesn't make it OK though - 'not as bad a Mugabe' isn't a defence.

At the margin

Last weekend, Martin Johnson said that 'International rugby is all about fine margins' after our depressing loss to South Africa. He is of course right: though there were times when the gap looked a little bigger than that, the reality is that minor changes appear large when played the game is played at that level - small differences matter.

This is hardly news to any economist. The reason demand curves look like they do is because marginal changes to feed through to behaviour overall even if they individually appear to be negligible. Of course this is slightly counterintuitive because no one wants to admit that they might be influenced by 1 or 2% at the margin, but at some point price changes mean behaviour changes, so that margin works somewhere. You would have thought from the coverage of the various economic discussion that people had fogotten this essential fact. Labour has long been guilty of this - I remember Adair Turner's Just Capital which claimed that the difference in incentives didn't change at low increases in income tax - rubbish - and a general heavy handedness on economic policy. Now we're at too: John Redwood may have a point about income tax being a better cut than VAT, but not that 2.5% doesn't matter when goods have been reduced by 10-20% so it won't matter.

I'm not a professional economist; I haven't done this formally for over 10 years, and then hardly to a high level, but I know that we need to stop pretending that the only change that counts is a big bang. Small percentages always matter.

Anthony Stewart Head

A quick hurrah for Anthony Stewart Head, famous now for Little Britain, but initially for coffee adverts that I never saw, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I watched endlessly.

It was my sister's birthday yesterday, and having time to kill before lunch with my parents, she (who has also watched Buffy endlessly) bought a Buffy book to read. At lunch (at which I was not there - the perils of working in White City), they spotted the actor in question and my father made the slightly trepidatious approach. I'm reliably informed he was lovely, came over, wished my sister happy birthday, signed the book (with some astonishment that someone would accidentally have it on them), and made a point of coming over again when he left to repeat his best wishes for the day.

He's not stratospherically famous but must get this quite a bit, so I think all credit must be given to him for being lovely about it all.

Such stories should be told.

There are some things money can't buy

This quote is priceless.* I almost want to frame it. It's not that she's entirely wrong, it's the totemic significance of 3 million for Labour and the sudden renunciation of its importance:

Even if unemployment reaches 3 million, that still leaves 90% in secure jobs. Most people will suffer not at all in this recession: on the contrary they will do well
Polly Toynbee, The Guardian 25.11.08

The rest of the article is also bit rubbish. My personal favourite is describing a tax that she admits affects 1.3% of the country as Labour having 'unfurled its old battle banner for social justice.'

Incidentally, Polly's grandfather, A.J., was a wide ranging historian and one of the first Byzantine chairs. He's less fashionable now, but he would have been pleased at the cyclical nature of politics and the significance of his grandaughter acknowledging that 3 million may not have been so bad after all.

*BTW, I've shamelessly stolen someone else's research to find it.

Gotcha

There has been much hand-wringing about the BNP's membership being leaked, and clearly it's not pleasant to have emails leaked, but but I find it very difficult to care about any rights infringement. After all, I am very happy for people to know my politics - it's presumably only a problem if it's really embarrassing.

Anyway, a spreadsheet to play with is too great a temptation. There can be some difficulty in locating it, but it's easily available here. And the heat map is great, though I think it needs some percentage analysis, I would do this in a table, but getting hold of the relevant census data is all but impossible online - outrageously.

However, at least as fun is the comments you can read on the details, except for the kids who get included because of their nutter parents. Some of these are just a reflection of the oddity of people - I can imagine mine would read oddly - but some you can only reflect BNP members, or sit incongruously with the rest of the BNP policy. Here are some of my favourites:

• Hobbies: motocycling, Staffordshire bull terriers
• State registered nurse. Orthopaedic nursing Cert. & Diploma in Nursing. Hobbies: walking, caravanning, cross-stitch & knitting, helping people in need
• Will not be renewing 07 (objects to being told he shouldn't wear a bomber jacket)
• Hobbies: freemasonry, church singing - activist
• Member of the Toastmasters Association
• Active Odinist/member of Pagan organisations. Hobbies: folklore
• member describes himself as a witch: potential embarrassment if active
• Retired antique dealer. Owner: tourist attraction in Canada. Former racing driver (British champion 1958). Hobbies: competition shooting, sword collector. Author.
• Retired historian, teacher & tutor. BA (Hons) History. Hobbies: occasional speaker (nationalist views); writing poetry

And of course there are there are the ones who live abroad. Six live in France, what do they say about foreigners there?

The second time as farce

I've deliberately not said much on the Ross / Brand stuff, for obvious reasons, but I find the news that Ross has been replaced by Angus Deayton for the comedy awards hugely amusing. It calls Marx's old adage to mind, though I wouldn't call Deayton's original firing as tragedy; and I'm not commenting on Ross.