Interview by Miranda Green for the website FiveBooks. More at fivebooks.com
Bleak House (1853)By Charles Dickens This is probably Dickens’s best evocation of a society in which your origins more or less determine your destiny. My job is, in essence, about trying as best I can to detach people’s life chances and their destiny from their origins, so that where you are born doesn’t determine where you die. Of course the whole point about Bleak House is that both its heroes and its transgressors are involved in that struggle against their origins. Esther Summerson, the slightly weedy central character, is born into these rather rocky circumstances, nobody quite knows where she comes from and therefore it’s unclear where she’ll end up. Lady Dedlock, the most interesting character, is transgressing because she has risen to a place where she should never have been. She gets her comeuppance: that’s the Victorian idea that you have to be careful and not rise too far above your station.
Bowling Alone (2000)By Robert D Putnam The two great challenges that face humankind are how we live with the planet and how we live together. Those two collide because climate change is moving vast populations across continents. The 500,000 interviews compiled for Bowling Alone reveal that people in American society are less connected, they do fewer things together, they don’t sign petitions. Where they used to go bowling in leagues they now go bowling alone or with their immediate family. These large movements of people that I’m talking about are happening in a context where the fragmentation of society Putnam describes is becoming even more severe—because technology is making people more alienated from each other. So it becomes even more difficult to deal with the unsettling effects of people on the move: how do you even begin to try to adapt?
The Wind in the Willows (1908)By Kenneth Grahame This is a very personal choice. I come from a standard immigrant, urban background and reading The Wind in the Willows opened my eyes to the way the English upper middle classes lived and the things they thought were important. Countryside. Woods—what the hell were woods? Picnics? So before I had even discovered Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, all these details—sandwiches, lemonade—were just jaw-dropping to me. This book is tied up with an age of Englishness which I think had a great many things to recommend it. People were a lot less embarrassed than they are now to talk about values—even if those values might not be ones you would share today. I think it’s good for young people, these ideas that you should be fair to others, and that there are certain ways of behaving that are reasonable in a good society.
Identity Economics (2010)By George A Akerlof and Rachel E Kranton This is a completely new idea, which, in essence, says that one effect of being in an increasingly liberal and affluent society is that aspects of identity that previously didn’t seem to matter much to economists are consciously influencing our behaviour. This is most significant when it comes to gender: women are becoming more conscious of making choices about what they do, and how, because they are women. In the past, economists didn’t really take these motivations into account. The authors also point out that immigrants are more likely to make a choice about where they live and work in order to be close to other people like them. This has very clear implications for what happens at the other end of the social scale. We have got to take this on board as we think about how to pick certain groups up off the floor.
The Black Jacobins (1938) By CLR James This is a very important book for me, about the first and only successful slave revolt in the Americas, in Haiti. CLR James’s book is very complex because it does not make the rebellion’s leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, into the sort of plaster saint that people now might make of Martin Luther King or, dare one say, Nelson Mandela. This is the guy who led a revolt against an absolutely brutal, manipulative slave-owning class and in some respects he had to be just as ghastly. But nonetheless, we have this incredibly heroic figure battling two things. First, the Napoleonic empire, this vast, colossal military and colonial power. Second, a systemic discrimination. The plantation owners would categorise the slaves according to how much European blood they had: there were 128 different classifications. This is what people today might call institutionalised racism.
Interview by Miranda Green for the website FiveBooks. More at fivebooks.com
Bleak House (1853)By Charles Dickens This is probably Dickens’s best evocation of a society in which your origins more or less determine your destiny. My job is, in essence, about trying as best I can to detach people’s life chances and their destiny from their origins, so that where you are born doesn’t determine where you die. Of course the whole point about Bleak House is that both its heroes and its transgressors are involved in that struggle against their origins. Esther Summerson, the slightly weedy central character, is born into these rather rocky circumstances, nobody quite knows where she comes from and therefore it’s unclear where she’ll end up. Lady Dedlock, the most interesting character, is transgressing because she has risen to a place where she should never have been. She gets her comeuppance: that’s the Victorian idea that you have to be careful and not rise too far above your station.
Bowling Alone (2000)By Robert D Putnam The two great challenges that face humankind are how we live with the planet and how we live together. Those two collide because climate change is moving vast populations across continents. The 500,000 interviews compiled for Bowling Alone reveal that people in American society are less connected, they do fewer things together, they don’t sign petitions. Where they used to go bowling in leagues they now go bowling alone or with their immediate family. These large movements of people that I’m talking about are happening in a context where the fragmentation of society Putnam describes is becoming even more severe—because technology is making people more alienated from each other. So it becomes even more difficult to deal with the unsettling effects of people on the move: how do you even begin to try to adapt?
The Wind in the Willows (1908)By Kenneth Grahame This is a very personal choice. I come from a standard immigrant, urban background and reading The Wind in the Willows opened my eyes to the way the English upper middle classes lived and the things they thought were important. Countryside. Woods—what the hell were woods? Picnics? So before I had even discovered Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, all these details—sandwiches, lemonade—were just jaw-dropping to me. This book is tied up with an age of Englishness which I think had a great many things to recommend it. People were a lot less embarrassed than they are now to talk about values—even if those values might not be ones you would share today. I think it’s good for young people, these ideas that you should be fair to others, and that there are certain ways of behaving that are reasonable in a good society.
Identity Economics (2010)By George A Akerlof and Rachel E Kranton This is a completely new idea, which, in essence, says that one effect of being in an increasingly liberal and affluent society is that aspects of identity that previously didn’t seem to matter much to economists are consciously influencing our behaviour. This is most significant when it comes to gender: women are becoming more conscious of making choices about what they do, and how, because they are women. In the past, economists didn’t really take these motivations into account. The authors also point out that immigrants are more likely to make a choice about where they live and work in order to be close to other people like them. This has very clear implications for what happens at the other end of the social scale. We have got to take this on board as we think about how to pick certain groups up off the floor.
The Black Jacobins (1938) By CLR James This is a very important book for me, about the first and only successful slave revolt in the Americas, in Haiti. CLR James’s book is very complex because it does not make the rebellion’s leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, into the sort of plaster saint that people now might make of Martin Luther King or, dare one say, Nelson Mandela. This is the guy who led a revolt against an absolutely brutal, manipulative slave-owning class and in some respects he had to be just as ghastly. But nonetheless, we have this incredibly heroic figure battling two things. First, the Napoleonic empire, this vast, colossal military and colonial power. Second, a systemic discrimination. The plantation owners would categorise the slaves according to how much European blood they had: there were 128 different classifications. This is what people today might call institutionalised racism.
Interview by Miranda Green for the website FiveBooks. More at fivebooks.com
