Review: Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography

I read this at a couple of sittings and enjoyed every bit of it. It's like Marxism; read this and you have the answer to everything. The ideas underpinning in it are strikingly simple, though only one of them is fully articulated.

First, even now countries are limited or enabled by their basic geography - where they are on the globe, whether they have rivers,mountains, natural harbours, fertile soil, forests or deserts. Marshall makes out a compelling case. Second, geopolitics - geographically influenced or determined political possibilities and necessities - geopolitics is always Realpolitik. Your neighbours are unlikely to be your friends and you have to prepare for the worst. It's always going to be Them or Us, a zero-sum game. You must always be ready to fight.

It's this second, less articulated theory which gives the book its Boys Own Annual feel. They ( usually China, Russia) are out to get us and they will get us if we don't get there first. It's true that Marshall quite often shows understanding for and even some sympathy for what they are about - he gives a very good account of why President Putin felt he had no option but to take Crimea - but his suspects are the usual suspects and he has a Foreword by Sir John Scarlett (Tony Blair's man at MI6 and not exactly a persuasive choice) to back him up.

Keep that reservation in mind but do read the book. It's very well done and full of ideas and small asides you will never even have thought of. He does, for example, give an interesting geographical explanation of why the Americans eventually decided to use the H-bomb on Japan though it doesn't explain why they didn't give the Japanese a demonstration of its power on empty land before they used it on real cities. True, that would not have had the shocking power of the real thing and the Americans felt that it was the viciousness of the Japanese military spirit - don't forget their war crimes - which had to be broken.

Available Now: Trevor Pateman, Materials and Medium - An Aesthetics

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In store now at Basil Blackwell, Broad Street, Oxford  and online at www.bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

Also available  at  www.cpibookdelivery.com & www.waterstones.com

Review: Lauren Elkin - Flaneuse

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There was a time – and I don’t know when it ended – when if you were self-assured, had the necessary leisure and some ability to write, you could write about pretty much anything which took your fancy, expressing your opinions or sentiments, often in short literary form (the essay), and you would have a decent chance of finding a publisher who would put you into print. You would then become a contributor to the genre of Belles Lettres.

At some point, belles lettres got put under pressure and specifically by professionalised academic writing where it was obligatory to distinguish fact and opinion and, in either case, obligatory to situate what you were saying fully and explicitly in the field of what other people had been saying - and preferably, very recently saying. The footnote and the Bibliography are the outward markers of academic writing - you might even say invented to mark the difference with belles lettres.

Publishers - and I suppose readers too - became wary of belles lettres. What was left from what academic writing had taken over was fiction, poetry and journalism, including the journalism of book reviews. Nowadays, the last bastion of belles lettres is the serious book review or essay in one of the serious Reviews: The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Financial Times, and so on.

Lauren Elkin situates her book within academic writing by providing copious notes – which I felt under no pressure to read – and a fairly long Bibliography. But the jacket design – very messy, actually – title page and quaint publishing house (Chatto and Windus) situates this as a non-academic book. On the jacket flap we are told it is “Part cultural meander, part memoir” – I am surprised they put it like that because this is tantamount to saying that the book is belles lettres.

And none the worse for that. It’s an interesting read, the short quasi-academic studies spliced with personal narrative and the stage set changing from city to city. The title and sub-title Flâneuse: Women Walk The City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London is not misleading but I would bet a bit of money that the author was under some pressure from literary agent and publisher to make it all hang together so that it could Fit into some category – social history or literary representations of the city or sexual discrimination at street level or just autobiography. There are many possibilities, some of which would have led to the writing of a dreadful book, dull and correct and easy to shelve. 

I enjoyed reading this book, though she lost me for a moment when late on she mentions keeping a dog in Paris, a dog shit city when I lived there (1971 – 72) and even long after. But I did find her narratives of Parisian history helped me understand how and why I have come to dislike Paris. She narrates the tragedies which today repeat themselves as farce: the ritual demonstrations, the immature bad temper (they were still honking car horns last time I went, albeit less fervently than in the 1970s), and the intense conservatism of the radicals, who think that the past is the model for the future right down to the cigarettes they still smoke. If you think Ruritania is stuck, try France - a country haunted by a collective memory of which several parts still have to be denied. Empire and Collaboration for starters.

I think the weakness of the book is that Elkin does not quite know what she stands for. On occasion, she expresses a forceful opinion or cracks a telling joke but much of the time she muses, a bit ironic, a bit fey. I made a mental contrast with Katie Roiphe. She should strike out a bit more, strut her stuff rather than stroll it .

Deborah Cameron's Summer Reading Picks

Times Higher Education summer reads 2016

Members of the higher education community tell us about two books they plan to take on holiday: a new must-read and a classic worthy of a second look

Deborah Cameron
Professor of language and communication, University of Oxford

I’m about to embark on a project that involves revisiting the classic texts of second-wave feminism, and I’m planning to begin with a book I haven’t read since I was 20: Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, an ambitious attempt at what its author called “a materialist view of history based on sex itself”. My new book is The Best I Can Do(degree zero), a collection of short essays in which the philosopher-turned-stamp-dealer Trevor Pateman reflects on everything from bus passes to the semiotics of lipstick – and whether scholarship should be a hobby rather than a salaried occupation.

THE, 14 July 2016

Review: Robert Roper, Nabokov in America

The core of this book is a scholarly study of how Lolita was made.It's clever idea was to notice that Lolita is a road-novel in which Humbert Humbert and Lolita criss-cross America by car and then to ask how Nabokov, a Russian emigre who arrived in the USA in 1940, aged forty, knew the roads. The answer is that Nabokov travelled them and did so primarily in pursuit of butterflies though ostensibly on the way to this or that lecturing job. They were long trips and they absorbed whole summers and Nabokov made copious notes about everything - roads, motels, sky-scapes, landscapes. All the time, he was collecting butterfly specimens for museum collections where he had a paid curatorial role.

Roper makes a fascinating piece of road-scholarship out of this and it only weakens when at the end he throws in a study of Pale Fire and a brief review of Nabokov's later life in Switzerland which could have been left out. In contrast, there is nothing here on Nabokov's role in the making of the first film version of Lolita.

Roper tracks the geographical sources of specific passages in Lolita and does the same for literary sources and antecedents in Nabokov's own writing. He turns up interesting facts such as the information that one of Nabokov's colleagues solved the problem of his own taste for nymphets by marrying a fourteen-year old (there being many more places where this could be legally done circa 1930s - 1940s than there are now). Nabokov duly absorbs the information his colleague volunteers.

I thought this an interesting and worthwhile book. I would have cut the chapters which don't belong and I would have asked for more insight into the extended collaboration between Nabokov and his wife Vera, who agreed with Nabokov that he was a genius and who clearly played a large part in keeping the show on the road, literally and metaphorically - she drove, she took dictation, she wrote lots of the letters needed. But the nature of their relationship remains opaque; perhaps it was essentially banal, like the political positions they occasionally espoused.

Though the book has been adequately proof-read, someone forgot to check the Contents page with results for which that someone ought to win a prize for negligence.

Added 19 May:

I left out what may be the most important thing. In all those road trips across America, Nabokov was not driving. His wife drove or a student hired as a chauffeur drove. Nabokov sat in the passenger seat or the back seat writing. Even in the posed photograph on the front cover of Roper's book, he is not in the driving seat. I need to go back to the book and check if he ever drove at all - maybe did not know how to. It may be important: driving in the 1940s and 1950s was surely marked as a + M masculine characteristic. Nabokov ducks the + M role - and as a result gains writing time.

On sale now: Trevor Pateman's new book The Best I Can Do

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This is the cover, ready for its ISBN barcode 978-0-9935879-0-0. Inside, 165 pages of text occupied by 26 essays as listed on the cover, extensively rewritten from my Blogs. Paperback, cover price £8.95

Available from Amazon, Blackwell and Waterstones online

Review: Richard Murphy, The Joy of Tax

This is an interesting, articulate book which criticises the United Kingdom's failing tax system and proposes a fairer system and - at the same time - defends the legitimacy and effectiveness of deficit financing. It gets better as it goes along: the final chapter is very good indeed in setting out a coherent progressive vision for UK tax policy. My doubts centre on some of the lacunae, the things Murphy does not write about. An enthusiast for government borrowing, treated as the painless creation of debt which can be put to good use, he nowhere mentions two things: debt servicing and Greece – the former is not mentioned at all and Greece gets just one mention for the size of its black economy (a quarter of total output).

Debt servicing matters for a number for reasons. It’s true that most governments still have remarkably little trouble selling bonds, even long-term ones, which promise a fixed return each year. They have been doing it for centuries. But problems can arise and they usually start in the second-hand market. Suppose a government issues a £100 bond promising 5% per year (that’s £5 to the bond owner once a year) plus face value back when the bond expires. Suppose it prices the bond at £100 and sells out. If the bond market thinks that 5% is generous and that the government is a dead cert to repay and that inflation is likely to be low, second-hand bonds may start to trade at higher than the original price. In contrast, if 5% seems mean or there are doubts about whether the government will repay or concerns about inflation eating away the repayment value then the second-hand price will fall. All of these things can create problems when the government issues its next lot of bonds. They may have to drop the price to £90 or £80 and still pay out £5 a year on the face value and still have to come up with £100 at the end even though they only got £80 or £90 to start with. It’s a further complication that if the bonds are traded internationally, it becomes relevant what foreigners think they can use £s for. If they think there is nothing the UK makes or does which they will want to spend their pounds on, then that will adversely affect their valuation of the bonds on offer. In the real world, some countries have currencies which are to all intents and purposes worthless outside their own boundaries because no one outside can think of anything they would want to do with that currency. It’s only if you start offering fantastic rates of interest that they may begin to look around to discover if maybe your economy actually produces something worth buying or buying more of.

There is also the small matter of how the government finds the money to pay the interest and repay the bonds. If it spends sensibly the money it gets from bond sales, then economic activity will increase and (in a well-run state) tax revenues will increase with it and there is no problem – money will come in to service the debt. In other words, bond money has been used to invest, to make things happen which otherwise wouldn't. This is the virtuous cycle which Murphy simply assumes. But if governments give away the money on electoral bribes ( “Everyone can now retire at 50!”) or if it has a corrupt or inefficient tax collection service ( = Greece), then no money will be generated to service the debt. In such circumstances, governments can try to sell new bonds to pay the debt on the old ones but sooner or later the market will realise that the government is now running a Ponzi scheme and will refuse to buy the bonds. At this point, the government can ‘fess up that it cannot service its debt and go into default. Or else, it has to cut back on important activities like the health service and schools and divert the money saved to paying interest on debt – at which point it loses popular support and in addition the ability to go on funding the retirement at 50 it has made everyone think was possible.

Somewhere in this interesting book such matters should have been addressed.