Hired: Six months undercover in low-wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Low paid, insecure and precarious work has come to characterise the modern labour market, and UnHerd columnist James Bloodworth’s book Hired exposes just how exploitative much of it is. In a similar vein to Polly Toynbee and George Orwell before him, Bloodworth goes undercover in various low paid jobs across the country to experience first hand the conditions millions of workers face. Hired is an illuminating piece of journalistic work and sheds light on a topic that rarely gets serious coverage. For this reason it is a must read.

Betraying Big Brother by Leta Hong Fincher

Leta Hong Fincher’s excellently researched book draws on extensive interviews with women across China to paint a portrait of a burgeoning feminist movement that is flourishing despite repression by the powerful Chinese state. Hong Fincher focuses on the feminists’ activism against domestic and sexual violence, unequal pay, sexual harassment in education and the workplace, arbitrary detention and political surveillance, and the more general fact that the Chinese Communist Party relies on patriarchal authoritarianism to enforce “harmony” and social stability. The stories of these Chinese women are inspirational and remind us of the need for continued feminist activism across the globe.

Mistaken Identity by Asad Haider

I have my differences with Asad Haider politically, but Mistaken Identity is a nuanced critique of identity politics from a socialist and anti-racist perspective. He briefly, yet energetically charts the history of identity politics from the Combahee River Collective in the 1970s to the present-day reemergence of social movements like Black Lives Matter. Haider argues that “identity politics” has lost any emancipatory potential it may once have had, and has degenerated into essentialism – viewing ‘identity’ in itself as an organisational category and a condition of being political. I did feel Haider could have further developed his advocacy of strategic “insurgent universality”, but Mistaken Identity is nonetheless an important contribution to the debate about identity politics on the Left.

HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen

The role of free speech is at the centre of the culture wars that are polarising Western society, and the concept of hate speech, and whether it should be criminalised, is a frequent topic of debate. Supporters argue that hate speech laws are a tool in the fight against racism and other forms of bigotry, and can remedy the injuries hate speech can cause.

Using strong legalistic arguments and evidence from other countries Nadine Strossen takes the view that hate speech laws are at best ineffective, and worst counterproductive, to their stated aims. In particular, she shows how vague the concept tends to be, leading to very loose interpretations and the propensity for abuse. It should not be a surprise that reactionary politicians and commentators in the US refer to Black Lives Matter as a “hate group”.

Strossen’s core argument is that the best way to fight against hate, and for equality and social justice, is not through censorship, but with the vigorous use of free speech. Her argument may not be popular in some circles, but the need to defend free speech from all threats is more important than ever.

Indefensible by Rohini Hensman

This is one of my favourite books of this year. Rohini Hensman has written a much needed critique of certain tendencies on the Left to subscribe to a hypocritical form of “anti-imperialism” – opposing imperialism from Western powers while expressing indifference, or worse support, for Russian imperialism, Iranian clerical imperialism or various Bonapartist regimes that are authoritarian and nationalist in nature and who give lip service to anti-Western populism. Indefensible should serve as a clarion call for the Left to practice a more consistent internationalism, where the values of freedom, democracy, self-determination and human rights apply to all parts of world.

Consider this very modern problem: I have given a test drug to 20 patients, and 15 of them responded positively. That’s a 75% ‘response rate’, in the jargon, in this sample of patients.

But common sense will tell you that 75% isn’t the drug’s true response rate (would you expect exactly 15 patients to respond out of every further 20 who were exposed to the treatment? Or sometimes 14, sometimes 18, and so on?) So: the observed response rate isn’t the truth. But – and again, applying merely to common sense, and with the supposition that I didn’t rig the trial in some way – surely a response rate of 75% is more probably the true response rate than, say, 25%?

More from the Christmas Reading collection

Why the Unabomber's Manifesto is essential reading

By Jamie Bartlett

To peer at the truth about a theory concerning the world (in this case, the true response rate of the drug) usually requires an act of inductive inference: from experimental observation (“We observed a 75% response rate in this study”), to statement about the truth (“The true response rate is more likely to lie between 50% and 90% than it is to lie below 10%”). You’ll never know the truth (shades of Jack Nicholson) – you can’t expose every possible patient throughout the Earth’s history to the drug, and count how many of that infinite set would respond – yet you can still make valid claims about it. Roll that thought about your head a moment, and then tell me Statistics isn’t sexy.

That there exists an inductive logic that more or less works is thanks in part to the Reverend Thomas Bayes, whose simple inquiry in the 18^th century provides the answer to what I called a “very modern problem”.

Here’s his version, posthumously published by his friend Richard Price, in 1763:

Other than f-for-s, this is essentially the “what is the probability that the true response rate for this drug lies between 50% and 90%, given that we’ve observed a 75% response in this trial?” question with which we opened.

Bayes answers like this: we have some hypothesis of interest; in this case, perhaps it’s “The true response rate for this drug is higher than 50%”. Call that hypothesis H. Before the trial, I must have some positive belief that H is true: call that Pr(H). Pr(H) must lie between zero (H is impossible), and 1 (H is certainly true) (and if Pr(H) didn’t lie between zero and one, there could be no justification for the experiment).

After the trial, the evidence – that 15 out of 20 patients responded – must alter that belief to an extent warranted by the observed results (else why do any experimental science at all?). “All” Bayes’ theorem makes plain is how you should modulate your pre-trial belief, Pr(H), into your post-trial belief, Pr(H, given that 15 out of 20 patients responded). Mathematically, it’s almost trivial. Inferentially and scientifically, it’s a revolution.

Almost every bit of tech you use pivots on his theorem – every Google auto-complete, not to mention the search algorithms themselves; Turing’s work at Bletchley; astronomical investigations of far-flung galaxies; medical imaging; genetic markers for disease predictions; nearly everything with the modern label “Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning”: all of these and thousands more exercises in human ingenuity make use, explicitly or otherwise, of the theorem which carries his name.

In one of those dead-ends to which civilisation can sometimes be prone, however, early 20th-century Statistics turned its face against Bayes: theories are either true, or false, and so to discuss them in terms of probability – worse, in terms of “your” probability – was an unwarranted intrusion of the subjective – of the self – into science, which (as every fule kno) is supposed to be entirely objective.

Further reading

Don't fight dirty with statistics

By Tom Chivers

Ronald Fisher, geneticist and statistician – a genius, a giant, but occasionally totally wrong – wrote Bayes out of the statistical universe, by inventing most of the methods that are taught to undergraduate scientists to this day, all of which pivot on “falsificationist” notions. As Popper held a theory to be scientific only to the extent to which an experiment could prove it false, so Fisher attempted an inductive logic by which data could “reject” a hypothesis.

Statisticians were aware of the limits of Fisher’s pseudo-objective approach (it often doesn’t work, it’s incoherent and, ironically, it is also unavoidably, enormously subjective), but continued to teach it – in four undergraduate years at the University of Glasgow, I received nine hours of Bayesian lectures, against heavens know how many hundreds of hours on ideas that flowed from Fisher.

Further reading

How gamification makes losers of us all

By Peter Franklin

I don’t have space to deal with Fisher’s issues here; suffice to say that Bayesian subjectivity isn’t an excuse for the post-modern relativism which is destroying the social sciences and nor does it imply that “there’s no such thing as the truth”. The biggest roadblock to Bayes wasn’t philosophical, but mechanical: for all but the simplest problems, the maths required to make the Bayesian machine work in practice is too “hard”.

And then the second Bayesian revolution happened. I started my PhD research just as that revolution picked up pace, in the early 1990s, with the “Gibbs sampler” publication of Gelfand and Smith. I’m blessed now to count among my direct colleagues (and friends) Professor Nicky Best (this year honoured by the Royal Statistical Society) who, along with coworkers David Lunn, Christopher Jackson, Andrew Thomas and the brilliant David Spiegelhalter invented BUGS: Bayesian inference using the Gibbs Sampler.

Gibbs sampling allows the statistician, no matter how complex his or her mathematical model – his or her representation of the theory under investigation – to draw simulated observations from that model’s idea of the world and to use those simulations for valid inference.

More from the Christmas Reading collection

Why Antifragile is the perfect read for today's turmoil

By Peter Franklin

“Given this noisy, blurred MRI scan of your brain: what is the representation of your actual brain that has highest probability? Which areas are most likely affected by stroke?” – my PhD questions were identical, mutatis mutandis, to Thomas’s 1763 “PROBLEM”, and in theory could be answered by application of his theorem. Prior to Gibbs, however, this was practically impossible: afterwards, it was (almost) trivial. Suddenly, every scientific problem that had a perfect Bayesian solution in theory almost always had nearly perfect Bayesian approximate solutions in practice.

Statistical science was rescued from its obscurity not by Fisher’s dead-end significance tests, but from a mechanical solution that made Bayes’ 1763 theorem relevant and applicable in almost any setting. Without doubt, the portrait for the new 50-pound note should be of Thomas Bayes, a truly Great Briton.

Two highly readable books by philosopher Ian Hacking also shaped my understanding of how, in his words, the “quiet statisticians have changed our world”: The Taming of Chance explains how the concept of statistical “laws” came to rival those of the physical world in terms of their impact on human affairs. And An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic is a great exposition of probability and the ideas of both Fisher and Bayes (and others). Probability, the language of uncertainty, is the thing that everyone (including undergraduate statisticians) thinks they “get”, until they think about it carefully and realise they don’t.

If you’d like to read more, Howson and Urbach’s Scientific Reasoning is magisterial. In the same year I wasn’t being taught Bayesian methods by Glasgow University’s statisticians, Peter Urbach’s partner, who headed the Drama department, gave me a copy of this book, and it changed my life. I recommend it to everyone; Howson and Urbach were philosophers of science, not statisticians, and it’s very readable. For completely un-mathematical friends I’ve been recommending Thinking Statistically by Uri Bram.

An eminent Financial Times journalist found himself in hot water when a young group of pluralist economists, including a colleague of mine, Dr Carolina Alves, pointed out that his “recommended reads” were bereft of books by women, as well as being rather Western-centric. In response, they pulled together an alternative reading list, and submitted an open letter to the Financial Times. Their list is well worth a look, alongside the brilliant Diane Coyle’s ‘Enlightened Economist’ list.

To these I will add my own list, including not only those books that hit the limelight last year, but also some that have been a bit more overlooked.

For those interested in why some of us are contrarians while others are copycats, and why it matters to the economy (and not just the stock market), I recommend Michelle Baddeley’s Copycats and Contrarians. For readers passionate about individual freedom, and who want to hear from those marginalised within our society, whose freedoms are trampled on, including by dogooders who claim to help them, then Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith is a must read. And while we’re taking a rest from work, Andrea Komlosy’s Work: the last 1,000 years helps us to reflect on what work is and how that’s changed over time.

If you’re speculating on what the ‘great economists’ would do in response to the many problems facing modern day economies, then take a look at Linda Yueh’s recently published and very readable book on the topic. The great women economists of history – like those today – are shockingly overlooked by the economics profession. Fortunately, Routledge have just published a Handbook of the History of Women’s Economic Thought, edited by Kirsten Madden and Robert Dimand. It is expensive and academically intense, but it is a much needed addition to any economist’s bookshelf.

For a critical perspective on modern day economic thought, try Mariana Mazzucato’s The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy, or Richard Koo’s The Other Half of Macroeconomics and the Fate of Globalization.

Suggested reading

An absence of ethics is driving our mass anxieties

By Paul Collier

Naturally, many authors had much to say about populism, Trump and Brexit, along with reflecting on the global financial crisis of a decade ago. Top picks include Isabel Sawhill’s The Forgotten Americans, Gerald Gordon’s Understanding Community, Economic Growth and Decline, Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift, Barry Eichengreen’s The Populist Temptation, Paul Collier’s The Future of Capitalism and Adam Tooze’s Crashed, many of which quite rightly draw on economic history to reflect on the present. And for a longer view, Nick Crafts weaves together the thoughts and findings of a career spent studying the rise and decline of the British economy in his Forging Ahead, Falling Behind and Fighting Back, which spans the Industrial Revolution through to the financial crisis.

It is also well worth keeping an eye on one of the big new trends in development economics and economic history: religion and the economy. Not since Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism has this area attracted so much interest, particularly amongst economists who have spent years ignoring social and cultural factors. Sriya Iyer, a colleague from the University of Cambridge, looks at India, whilst Jared Rubin’s book, published last year, takes on the Middle East. Looking ahead to next year, Mark Koyama and Noel Johnson’s Persecution and Toleration explores how and why religious freedom developed in the West.

Finally, if you’re looking to start this new year on an optimistic note, I will be sitting down to read, and hoping to draw inspiration from, How change happens by Leslie Crutchfield, after a long and busy year writing my own book, due out in the spring.

Suggested reading

Could Mill's model mend capitalism?

By Victoria Bateman

Cass’ groundbreaking work tackles one of the great issues of our time, the decline of decently-paying work that does not require high levels of formal education. Much of our social and political unrest can be traced at least partially to this development. Automation, immigration, and globalisation have combined to make many of our fellow citizens economically expendable. And the result is continued support for various forms of populism, both on the Left (Corbynite) and the Right (Trumpist).

More Christmas Reading

Taking on the Social Justice Warriors

By Eric Kaufmann

Cass’ central insight is that this development has occurred because we have come to value people only as consumers. But psychologically, people derive self-worth and identity from their roles as producers. They want to contribute something of value that allows them to support themselves as much as possible and share in the bounties of what together we create. Take this away, as the modern economy increasingly does, and all the transfer payments in the world cannot replace that sense of dignity and belonging that comes from paid work.

The book details a host of potential policies that aim to reverse these trends. In the United States, where suspicion of any government intervention in the marketplace remains strong, Cass’ book has unleashed a firestorm of criticism from the high priests of neoliberalism. Readers in other nations where such theological disputes are rarer might have an easier time taking on some of his ideas and making them part of a coherent, reforming conservatism that speaks to our time.

Levy’s book is a biography of one of America’s great sports heroes, the baseball icon Babe Ruth, but has an appeal that reaches beyond just baseball fans. What makes it interesting reading for everyone is its depiction of American life nearly a century ago.

Each chapter addresses one aspect of Ruth’s life and the world in which he lived. One addresses his troubled childhood, through which we glimpse working-class life and neighborhoods at the turn of the 20^th Century. This is a world of violence, family, and a reliance on informal social institutions that is virtually unknown today.

More from this author

Is Sasse smart enough to unite America?

By Henry Olsen

As Ruth’s family unravels, it is striking that no government agency is ever involved. There is no social services agency to draw benefits from when times get tough, no child protection service to intervene when Ruth’s parents place him in a Catholic orphanage. The police are friends of families in the neighborhood and practice an informal role in maintaining order that surely would be out of order in today’s rules-based societies. It is a freer, and riskier, world.

Other chapters work similar magic. One on his barnstorming tour of New Jersey in 1927 shows a world where individuals act quickly to bring entertainment to their towns: no permits need to be obtained, there are no government-owned facilities to rent. Another on Ruth’s failed effort to prevent unscrupulous businessmen from commercially trading on his fame shows how uneasily the common law sat with our mass commercial society.

The chapter on his marriages and dalliances explores how relatively anonymous even the most famous people could be in this pre-television age, when even radio was in its infancy. Ruth’s first wife, for example, leads a secret second life as the wife of another man in Boston before her untimely death in a house fire unmasks her. Can anyone imagine a WAG today escaping such public scrutiny to lead a double life?

The result is an entertaining and very informative look into daily life in the not so distant past. People were freer and communities stronger, but life was harder and more precarious.

A start, at least, would be to recognise what has gone wrong, and why. Real discussion is vital. In particular, those who feel increasingly estranged from our political system are crying out to be acknowledged, and they are long overdue a hearing.

To understand the root causes of the current political eruptions playing out across the West, one could do no better than read National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, by Professors Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell. In this brave and analytical book, the authors identify the seeds of the movements that have driven a stake through the heart of the liberal centrist order, how the rebellion was long in the making, and how a remote and tin-eared establishment became increasingly inattentive to the plight of millions who were demanding economic and cultural security.

Suggested reading

What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

Rarely are political studies written so explicitly from the perspective of the masses – presumably because most academics and commentators spend so little time mixing with them – which makes this book profoundly refreshing. It should be in the stocking of every member of the political class on Christmas morning.

On a similar theme, Ben Cobley’s The Tribe offers an excellent deconstruction of the whole divisive concept of identity politics and its permeation throughout our public institutions. Cobley demonstrates how this most regressive of ideologies – historically driven by the liberal Left, but later adopted by politicians and public leaders across the piece – has, through its obsessive focus on diversity above all else, exacerbated the very thing it sought to eradicate: prejudice and discrimination on the grounds of biology. It deserves a wide audience.

Suggested reading

The economic rationalists don't get the immigration debate

By Ben Cobley

For lighter – or perhaps darker – relief, I will again turn to a BBC Christmas staple, A Ghost Story for Christmas, a festive treat broadcast regularly in the 1970s (usually a reworking of an MR James spine-tingler) and revived some years ago. A classic episode was an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ The Signalman, in which the eponymous character, paranoid and tormented by a terrifying spectre while toiling away in his little railway signal box, is played masterfully by the late Denholm Elliott. The story was said to be influenced by Dickens’ own survival of a horrific fatal train crash in Staplehurst, Kent, in 1865, which haunted him for the rest of his days. The short book, which chills to the marrow, is a fine yuletide accompaniment to a glowing fire and a small glass of whisky.

John Masefield’s The Box of Delights, is another festive delight. It is a magical tale about a young boy who, while heading home from school for the Christmas holidays, is waylaid by an old man seeking his help in a desperate effort to keep a small box giving the power of time-travel out of the hands of pursuers. If you have young ‘uns, read it to them – even if they don’t want you to. They will almost certainly enjoy it – and even if they don’t, they will have benefited from the historical lesson that children once lived happily without Smartphones and Xboxes.

But back to Flanders. Thumbing through A Literary Christmas, I hit upon GK Chesterton’s The Truce of Christmas, inspired by the ceasefire that occurred on Christmas Day 1914. Might the final verse foretell our own predicament as we head through and beyond this most discontented of winters?

Hunger is hard and time is tough,
But bless the beggars and kiss the kings;
For hope has broken the heart of things,
And nothing was ever praised enough.
(But hold the shield for a sudden swing
And point the sword when you praise a thing,
For we are for all men under the sun,
And they are against us every one;
And mime and merchant, thane and thrall
Hate us because we love them all;
Only till Christmastide go by
Passionate peace is in the sky.)

We shall see.

Merry Christmas.

More Christmas Reading

The writer whose books simply have to be shared

By Polly MacKenzie

Of course, to confess to a classic you have not read risks opening you up to scorn and ridicule. Which is why most people say that they have “re-read” a book, even if they have in fact just read it for the first time. But people should be honest about what they don’t know. Though even this, like everything, has limits.

In David Lodge’s 1975 novel, Changing Places, a group of academics play the game of admitting to the great literary work they’ve never read. There are obvious ones that aren’t too embarrassing. Everyone thinks they’ve read Oliver Twist but, in fact, someone admitting they’ve only seen the adaptations is a great relief all round. One of Lodge’s characters goes too far, though, and amid the thrill of confession he, a professor of literature, admits that he has never read Hamlet. After which he loses his job.

More Christmas Reading

Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

Anyway, earlier this year, when I was given a thumping great modern novel, the rewards of which did not strike me as obviously being worth the journey, I decided to read Dostoyevsky instead. I’d read some of the other works. But to my shame, I had never read Crime and Punishment. So I cast aside the modern novel and delved into one of my biggest reading gaps.

Crime and Punishment is not a chore, and it is most certainly worth the journey. From the start, I couldn’t put it down. Then after the first 100 pages, or so, I had to. Not least because I was starting to feel like I had committed the crime myself. Dostoyevsky’s description of the lead up to the terrible act, with Raskolnikov feeling drawn towards his crime as someone whose clothing has got caught up in a machine, tugs the reader in with it. The crime itself is described with such vivid horror that you might be forgiven for sweating through it – as I did.

One thing in particular struck me, and worried me, when I finally put the novel down. As those who have read – or “re-read” the novel – will know, the story is ultimately one of redemption. In all the years that I have known about it but not read it, and right up to cracking open the spine of the novel itself this year, I had expected the story of Crime and Punishment to be far worse than it is.

Suggested reading

Communism's forgotten victims

By Douglas Murray

As Raskolnikov’s mother and sister arrive in St Petersburg, I was imagining the depths of suffering, violence and devastation that would eventually be brought down on them. I was picturing the same with the one woman who – not to give the tale away – seems able to save Raskolnikov as well as the prison to which he goes. But all of this, and much more besides, seemed almost tame in the reading, compared with the horrors of bleakness I was expecting Dostoyevsky to perform.

And then it struck me that my expectation wasn’t because I have an unusually dark view of the world. It is because after the horrors of the 20th century, we all do. When we think of a prison or a camp in Russia, we don’t conjure the bleak workplace of the Tsars. We think of the horrors of the Gulag. When we imagine terrible vengeance being wreaked on people, we think of their entire family being decimated. They do not suffer: they are annihilated. And it all happens without justification or meaning and without the slightest chance of any redemption.

This – at any rate it seems to me – is one of the lessons that almost everybody has taken from the century between Dostoyevsky’s and our own. And that made me wonder not just about Dostoyevsky’s world, and the lessons which it might impart, but of the lessons we have absorbed from our own time and cannot shrug off.

So I would say, read Dostoyevsky not to fill a gap in your reading knowledge or to win a competition among peers, but for an understanding of Dostoyevsky’s own time, and ours, and of some hopes that would appear to be timeless.

If nothing else, paradox provokes a deeper consideration of the related issues. Or at least it would if the modern mind was open to such forms of enquiry. Sadly we’ve become so trammelled by simplistic psuedo-rationality that even the mildest spurs to imagination are rejected as illogical. 

Here’s something else that might not make sense: my book of the year is by the aforementioned Mr. Taleb, but it’s not the book he published this year (the brilliant Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily life), but Antifragile: Things that Benefit from Disorder, which came out in 2013. The reason I’ve chosen the older book is not just because I love it and keep returning to it, but because of one of the key ideas featured in Antifragile: the Lindy effect.

Because we’re human we associate age with impending mortality. But for things not subject to a process of inevitable decay, the opposite tends to be true: the longer something has been around already, the longer it’s likely to survive into the future. Taleb calls it “‘aging’ in reverse.”

Books are a great example. The longer that a book has been in print, the greater the chance of it still being in print for years or decades to come. One year in print proves nothing; ten years shows staying power; a hundred and it’s probably a classic; and if it’s older than printing itself, then it’s a cultural cornerstone and quite possibly sacred.

This is why book reviews should be of older books – not the very oldest, because they speak for themselves, but those whose relevance is sufficiently enduring to require explanation. Furthermore, if a reviewer is re-reading and thinking about a book years after the first read, he or she might just have something worth saying about it.

Suggested reading

Ten years after the crash, we should still be terrified

By Peter Franklin

To my mind, Taleb is the greatest living UnHerdian – no contemporary thinker has done more to challenge the herd-like thinking of the economic, political and cultural elites. Taleb’s best-known work is The Black Swan, which argues that people are very bad at foreseeing extremely unlikely, but massively consequential, events. Because these ‘Black Swans’ are bound to happen sooner or later, it is the improbable and unpredictable that shapes human history, not the commonplace events that can be predicted.

What distinguishes modernity from the rest of history, however, is that because we now have the technical ability to predict the commonplace with considerable accuracy (e.g. short-term weather forecasts), we’re deluded into thinking that we can also foresee the events that really matter. Hence a banking system organised around sophisticated risk models that supposedly had us prepared for the worst that could happen.

Taleb was among the very few financial experts who recognised that the models were fundamentally flawed – and said so long before the credit crunch and the global banking crisis. Furthermore, as a trader, he put his money where his mouth was – betting against the prevailing wisdom of the financial markets.

He’s never said just how much money he made in the process, but it was enough for him to give up the day job and devote his life to philosophical enquiry. Antifragile is the result of those studies, but it isn’t a conventional work of philosophy – not in the modern academic sense, anyway. Thankfully, it owes a great more to the classical tradition, in that it is accessible, eclectic and useful.

More Christmas reading

Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

In fact, more than useful, it is indispensable. While his earlier books explained why extreme events are so hard to predict, Antifragile is about how to live in this fundamentally unpredictable world.

This is where his concept of ‘antifragility’ comes in. You might think that the opposite of ‘fragility’ is ‘robustness’, but things that are robust are merely immune to the harm that disorder does to things which are fragile. The complete opposite of fragility would apply to things that actually gain from disorder.

There is no word for this property in the English language, which is why Taleb has invented one of his own. He gives various practical examples of antifragility – one of the most important of which lies in the difference between mechanical and living systems. The latter are antifragile not only because they can repair themselves, but because in the process of doing so they often get stronger.

Think about the impact of exercise on the human body – in the short-term, individual muscle fibres break under the strain (hence the soreness that results from a workout), but as the muscles repair themselves the fibres multiply, increasing muscle mass and power.

Indeed, to avoid the stresses and strains of physical effort altogether is very bad for our health. It weakens the body and invites the Black Swan of catastrophic illness – an extreme shock from which the body might never recover.

More Christmas Reading

The writer whose books simply have to be shared

By Polly MacKenzie

Much the same applies to the economy. In the years prior to the credit crunch, governments used cheap money policies to smooth out the business cycle – “no more boom and bust” as Gordon Brown once said. For a while it worked, growth was steady and recessions were avoided, but only at the cost of running up debts that hugely amplified the pain when the crunch finally came.

In a warning that is sadly just as relevant today, Taleb argues powerfully and persistently against the distorting effect of debt – that great attractor of Black Swans. He also argues that the normal ups-and-downs of the business cycle are in any case to be welcomed, not avoided. In order to be antifragile it is necessary that some parts of the economy are allowed to fail so that the whole can get stronger.

Taleb makes the appropriate nods to those who have made this point before him – in particular, Joseph Schumpeter and his idea of creative destruction. However, Taleb brings something new to the table: he takes a number of established ideas that will be well-understood and appreciated by conservatives (the real kind, not those lobbying on behalf of crony capitalism) and systematically relates them to his insight on the true nature of risk and uncertainty.

Suggested Reading

The West is one crash from chaos

By Henry Olsen

As he repeatedly reminds us, it is the extreme probabilities – the Black Swan events – that matter. Simplistic models of risk concentrate on the most likely scenarios (i.e. the highest point on a bell curve of possible outcomes). Supposedly more sophisticated models take account of some of the more extreme possibilities – say, the one-in-a-hundred chances. Taleb, however, urges us to take into account the full range of possibilities contained within the ‘tails’ of the bell curve.

For some things, the tails don’t extend very far – for instance, the possible range of human life expectancies is limited on one side of the graph to zero years, and on the other to roughly 120 years. But in other cases – such as household income – at least one side of the curve is practically unlimited, extending far beyond the commonplace. Statisticians calls these ‘fat tails’ because they encompass such a wide spread of outcomes.

Because these fat tails tend to occur on only one side of the curve, the nature of risk in the real world is highly asymmetric – i.e. the worst that could happen is much more significant than the best that could happen and vice versa. For instance, exceeding the speed limit may get you to your destination a bit faster (modest upside) or it might get you killed (extreme downside). On the other hand, a canny investment in an exciting new start-up might see you lose an affordable slice of your savings (modest downside) or get you an early stake in the next Google (extreme upside).

Conventional policy making tends to focus on the most likely outcomes in any given scenario, yet it is the extreme events which change the world. Therefore our top priority should be to minimise our exposure to the extreme downsides (the negative Black Swans) and maximise our exposure to the extreme upsides (the positive Black Swans).

Suggested Reading

If you don't 'get' statistics it's just as bad as not 'getting' Shakespeare

By Graeme Archer

The key to such a strategy is what Taleb calls “optionality”. In investment terms, an option gives you the right, but not the obligation, to pursue an opportunity. It therefore allows you to cut your losses if things don’t work out or maximise your gain if they do. Furthermore, because positive Black Swans (like their negative brethren) are uncommon and you can’t tell in advance where they’ll appear, you need to have the widest possible range of options.

Policy making that maximises optionality will therefore favour the small over the large, diversity over uniformity and localisation over centralisation. Of course, many other thinkers have come to similar conclusions. For instance, in a famous paper entitled ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’, Friedrich Hayek argued that information is widely dispersed and thus can only be made use of though the free interaction of local actors as opposed to a single, central authority.

But Taleb shows us there’s more going on than local knowledge. While knowledge of the commonplace may well be local in nature, advance knowledge of the extreme events that make the most impact isn’t available anywhere. The strongest argument for decentralised, diversified decision-making is that it allows us to make lots of little investments in the hope that at least one of them will pay off big-time. In other words, localism isn’t just about getting smart, it’s also about getting lucky (and not leaving everything exposed to any particular instance of bad luck).

Looking at the great policy disasters of recent times, it’s telling that the approach taken by policy makers is diametrically opposed to Taleb’s ideas. Over and over again, we see governments betting the farm on projects with limited optionality and where the worst that can happen overshadows the best that can happen.

Suggested Reading

The great British cock-up: ten times the state got it catastrophically wrong

By Peter Franklin

The Eurozone, for instance, represented a single enormous investment in a scheme with a modest upside (reduced transaction costs) and an extreme downside (the ongoing Eurozone crisis). The deregulation of the banks was another example (profits for the few versus bail out costs for the many), as was the deliberate inflation of the property market (short-lived boost versus long-term damage to growth and housebuilding). Looking to the future one has to question mega-projects like HS2 (modest improvement to travel times versus spiralling costs) or the construction of nuclear power stations (ask the Japanese).

As this is a book review, I should say something about its style as well as its substance. So, a word of warning: the former will not be to everyone’s taste.

For a start you never quite know what’s coming next. The book is a patchwork of philosophy, economics, mathematics, lifestyle advice and autobiography. Alighting from one subject to the next, Taleb also switches between different modes of explanation – from graph to anecdote to polemic. There are snatches of history, literary allusions and fictional dialogues. In short it’s a riot (though not a mess). If you prefer the sort of book that behaves itself, proceeding from point to point in a straight line then Antifragile is not for you.

The book also places some demands on the reader. Not because of its language, which is far from turgid, nor because of its grounding in statistics and probability (all but the simplest maths is confined to a technical appendix). Rather, it is the structure of the argument that requires the reader’s full attention. By approaching his points from various tangents and angles, Taleb is showing that they apply not just to the world of finance but to other domains too. Moreover, by making the reader work, the book embodies its own advice. Physical effort strengthens the body and mental effort strengthens the mind.

Suggested Reading

How (some) economists finally caught up with financial reality

By Peter Franklin

Finally, the reader needs to get on with the author as a person. For all of its patchwork quality, every part of the book is stamped with Taleb’s character – and he is not a man given to false modesty or to suffering fools (and knaves) gladly. Readers may or may not care for this sort of thing, but for me it was a breath of fresh air.

Those who were morally, intellectually and directly responsible for the economic calamities of the 2000s have mostly got away with it. Many are still in post – whether in government, business or academia – others enjoy comfortable retirements.  So why shouldn’t those who were right about the banks and the Eurozone and all the other disasters say ‘I told you so’? They have every right to their anger.

For the most part, however, this is not an angry book. Rather it is a demolition of the false certainties that still bedevil the modern world.

Antifragility is neither Left-wing nor Right-wing in its politics, but is an important addition to – indeed a development of – conservative thought. Conservative philosophers have long recognised the limits of human rationality, but their suggested response to this reality has tended towards the passive, bordering on the defeatist.

Taleb’s great achievement is to bring a more active principle into play. Fully aware of the uncertainties of human existence, he nevertheless shows us that we can position ourselves against them – shielding ourselves against the downside, but open to the upside.

Spearheaded by radical staff and students, and leveraging twitter to harass and intimidate opponents, SJW excesses provide fodder for the Right-wing media, and continue to raise the temperature of the culture wars. Are the SJWs a wholly new product, brought to life by social media and a coddled generation, as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff argue? While I love their book, the headwaters of this movement lie further back in time.

Further reading

Can anything arrest the polarisation of the West?

By Eric Kaufmann

The 1960s brought many societal advancements, such as the extension of civil rights to blacks in the American South and a new push for gender equality. Protests helped draw attention to injustices and mobilise public support. However, in the heat of the moment it’s tricky to know how far to push things.

Legitimate protest tipped, at elite universities, into a frontal assault on intellectual merit and the norms of rules-based deliberation – the foundations of the university. Protest, occupation and emotional release came to be sanctified as equivalent or even superior to the Socratic or Popperian models. Moralistic poses could trump evidence and logic.

Sixties radicals cited their resistance to power and hierarchy, championing narratives of liberation and equality to justify a radical revolution in the curriculum. The first generation of writers to dissent from this cultural radicalism were largely New York Jewish, ex-socialist, figures like Daniel Bell and Nathan Glazer, who shifted Right in disgust at the anti-intellectualism of the students.

More Christmas Reading

Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976) is a classic of conservative cultural thinking. In the book, he traces the origins of what he termed the ‘antinomian’ strain in western culture. Originally contained within utopian socialism and anarchism, the expressive-individualist impulse to reject tradition and community became the dominant force in western art and high culture between 1880 and 1930.

This sensibility was contained within small circles of bohemian intellectuals before bursting forth in the 1960s onto the stage of mass culture due to the rapid expansion of universities and the television media. Capitalism co-opted bohemianism, leading to a working arrangement in which people were encouraged to work hard during the day like disciplined puritans, then switch masks to become indebted hedonistic bohemians by night and on the weekend. For Bell, this cultural contradiction defined the modern West but rendered society unstable, ripe for a ‘great instauration’ of tradition.

Where New York intellectuals like Bell reacted to the first wave of student revolts, the second upwelling of progressive unreason took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This period gave rise to speech codes and attacks on the western canon in philosophy and history. Some scholars favoured a new Afrocentric or multicultural curriculum, fingering Eurocentrism as the fount of all problems.

The use of the word ‘postmodernism’ in English-language books exploded. ‘Political correctness’, ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ enjoyed similar takeoffs, as a Google Ngram Viewer makes clear. In this febrile atmosphere, Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind (1987) exposed the fatuousness of many of these trends while criticising my generation (‘Generation X’) for its superficiality, lack of intellectual curiosity and narcissism.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt take a similar approach in The Coddling of the American Mind, published earlier this year, remarking on the fragility of the social media generation (born after 1995) known as ‘Gen Z’ or ‘i-Gen’. Raised by helicopter parents and sheltered by protective teachers and counsellors, these youngsters have not developed the resilience to take risks and deal with uncomfortable ideas. According to the authors, many of the new generation seek protection and safety over freedom and exploration.

Meanwhile, the post-1980s saturation of the academic humanities and social sciences by the Left, and the rise of zealous diversity administrators, has emptied the academy of the intellectual diversity which acted as a check on the wilder impulses of New Left ideologues. Together, these twin forces have produced today’s lexicon of ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, ‘microaggressions’ and ‘bias response teams’.

Once speech is equated with violence, no quarter can be given to purveyors of dangerous ideas, while nothing must stand in the way of the noble mission of equity and diversity. The disturbances at Evergreen State College (where whites were effectively ordered off campus for a day) and Middlebury College (where Charles Murray was forcibly prevented from speaking) are examples of the new campus fundamentalism.

Suggested reading

Why I welcome the Economist's mea culpa

By David Goodhart

You know a non-academic has struck a chord when, at the last count, his book has accrued 562 academic citations, far more than anything I’ve managed as a longstanding professor. In 2017’s The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart helps make sense of our post-UKIP, post-Brexit world. He nicely lays his finger on the key divide in modern western societies between ‘Anywheres’, whose identity is tied to their credentials and achievements, and the ‘Somewheres’, whose identity is rooted in place, ethnicity or nationhood.

In Britain, about a quarter of the population are Anywheres, many of whom attended residential universities and voted Remain. Somewheres, about half the population, tended to vote Leave. About half the UK population lives within 20 miles of where they were born, and this group exists a world away from the bubble of those who form opinions in the media and academia, or play a leading role in politics and finance.

Somewheres have stronger national identities than Anywheres, view change as loss and tend to want less immigration and economic change. Their interests are ill-served by an Anywhere elite, whose mobility and lack of connection to place renders them tone-deaf to the longings of those with a Somewhere worldview. Goodhart suggests the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum was a democratic expression of discontent from the Somewheres, whose cultural and economic interests have been repeatedly ignored by governments since Blair. He urges more Somewhere input into culture and politics – and a new accommodation between Somewheres and Anywheres that better balances the desires of each – in order reduce the pressures driving populism and polarisation.

More Christmas Reading

Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

Chief among these is Lewis Mumford’s two volume Myth of the Machine (1966 and 1970) which examines the relationship between technology and culture from early man to now. This is everything Yuval Noah Harari has written in Sapiens or Homo Deus, and more (although Mumford is harder to read). Mumford was the pre-eminent tech critic of the 1960s and saw it as a dehumanising system of control.

In a similar vein, check out Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). He argued that Huxley (distraction and entertainment) not Orwell (surveillance and boots) better predicted our dystopian future. The core idea is that the medium of communication dictates the sort of ideas and culture that can be sustained in a society (he was a student of philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan after all). His focus on – and critique of – cable TV in the US is brilliant, and more relevant for social media than he could have predicted.

More from this author

How social media makes fascists of us all

By Jamie Bartlett

I find the radical fringes of thought are often a source of unexpected insight that mainstream writers dare not think or say. To that end, take a look at – and hold your breath for – the Unabomber’s Manifesto (1995). Ted Kascinski is a convicted terrorist who killed three people in a wave of anti-technology violence, and Manifesto is a rage against technology, which is in places violent and racist. But tucked inside are also fascinating speculations and predictions, some of which look surprisingly insightful twenty-five years on. (And don’t rule out a new wave of luddist violence – something I predicted here).

In a similar vein – Timothy C. May’s book-length blog ‘Cyphernomicon’ (1994) is a wild, bizarre, yet visionary, set of predictions about how encryption would transform society: crypto-currencies, dark net markets, ubiquitous encryption are all in there. May believed this would one day fatally weaken governments. He celebrated these trends; many of us will not.

Both of these works will shock and annoy you, but if you read them sceptically and carefully you’ll get a lot from them. And they’re both free to download.

More Christmas Reading

A survivor's guide to trauma

By Bidisha

Looking ahead rather than behind, two recent books set out a big problem heading our way. Both Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction and Sayifa Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (who both had decent stints in the private sector before writing these books) show how an increasing number of decisions are taken by smart machines and algorithms – but that doesn’t mean they will be less biased. In fact, they might simply replicate, or even worsen, existing economic, racial, gender or other inequalities, because they will appear objective and credible.

This problem – invisible algorithmic bias through search engines, or data discrimination – will become a major public preconception very soon, perhaps as soon as next year. The sooner we start thinking about it the better.

It only struck me some time after reading two superb books on the Booker shortlist this year – Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black and Anna Burns’ Milkman – that they had something in common: both draw much of their force from the protagonist’s watchful, wary navigation of looming threats. They reveal this, however, using completely different styles.

Washington Black first unfurls in a Barbados sugar plantation in 1830: its story is told in the first person, through the eyes of Wash, who is an enslaved boy of 10 or 11 when the story starts with the ominous arrival of a “tall, impatient, sickly” new master. Wash senses evil: “He owned me, as he owned all those I lived among, not only our lives but also our deaths, and that pleased him too much.” Edugyan’s writing style is poetic and clear, with an ear for the verbal formality of the era: the brutality of slavery seeps through the elegant prose.

From the Christmas Reading series

Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

One piercing aspect of this book – particularly in the pages before Wash flees the plantation – is its understanding of how keenly sharp a sense of vigilance is needed to survive in a brutally untrustworthy world. Small errors of judgement might lead indirectly to violent beatings or worse; the faintest danger must be scented far in advance of its arrival. Fear is written in the involuntary responses of the body, even before it is clarified in the mind: “I felt the soft tremor of my hands in my lap.”

When an older white man, Mister Philip, compels Wash to accompany him to an isolated spot and then proceeds to shoot himself, the thing that really terrifies Wash is not “the sudden violence, which had been with me since birth, but from the terrible fact that I alone had been present at the death of a white man”. With an unforced touch, the depth of slavery’s internal reach is conveyed. Escape, when it comes, is all the more welcome.

The 18-year-old female protagonist of Milkman inhabits an unnamed city and time, but one that looks and feels very like 1970s Belfast, where the author grew up in the thick of the Troubles. The narrator, known only as “middle-sister”, has much more freedom to steer her fate than Wash, of course, but she too must be vigilant: she moves in a volatile community, mined with potential violence, where the constant slosh of rumour and grudges can suddenly harden into open threat.

When a powerful paramilitary known only as “Milkman” begins to stalk her, a complex weight of judgements descends upon her. Burns’ mode of writing is radically different from that of Edugyan: nerviness is baked into the style, which is full of concealments, layered considerations and circumlocutions, the highways and byways of a mind under intensifying stress. Real names are not revealed, and nor are those of terrorist organisations – they are “renouncers” or “defenders” – and the steady warping of domestic life is signalled by slick piles of murdered dogs and a headless cat.

From the Christmas Reading series

Why you should read more history

By Tom Chivers

The reviewer in the New York Times called Milkman “interminable” and “wilfully demanding and opaque” – but I had quite the opposite experience: I found it consistently gripping and darkly funny. Perhaps, being from Belfast myself, both its cadences and its caginess were more immediately familiar. There’s still a bit in many of us from that city that – when asked too forward a question – instinctively responds: “Who wants to know?”

For those who, following Milkman, have an appetite for another book set in Belfast, I can recommend rediscovering Brian Moore’s brilliant 1955 novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, about a Catholic spinster struggling to stay afloat in fraying circumstances, as acutely poignant a portrait of loneliness as I have ever read.

Two other honourable mentions: one is Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries, translated from the German by Damion Searls. I’m still in the midst of it: at nearly 2,000 pages, with 367 chapters, it’s a behemoth of a book, but worth the commitment. The novel charts a year – between 1967 and 1968 – in the New York life of Gesine Cresspahl, a German émigré, and her young daughter Marie, as arguments rage over Vietnam; in parallel, it recounts the story of Gesine’s family during the 1930s in Jerichow, a small town in Germany. Anniversaries is a huge feat of the imagination, dense with vivid, criss-crossing detail and moral complexity: every part of history that Johnson’s pen touches springs to life.

The other pleasure was Christopher Howse’s Soho In The Eighties, an affectionate but enjoyably clear-sighted portrait of the wilfully eccentric, louche drinkers – linked to a variety of professions – who were so often bolted to bar stools in Soho boozers such as The French House and The Coach & Horses. They included Jeffrey Bernard, the former author of the Spectator’s ‘Low Life’ column, who became famous nationwide for his wit and disintegration. Howse, who drank among them, has a wonderful turn of phrase himself: he describes one filthy little pub, the Kismet, as “like drinking in a badly run public lavatory”. The ‘characters’ would have grown tedious at times in real life, I suspect: many of them enjoyed giving their well-worn catchphrases repeated outings. But there was also badinage, camaraderie, feuds and idiosyncrasies aplenty, and a kind of purity to their habitual recklessness. In an era of rampant offence-taking and aggressive public piety, this book is a welcome blast of smoky air.

It started with film. I was watching Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin, which portrays the last hours of the dictator’s life and the scrabble for power afterward in bleakly hilarious fashion, and then Bridge of Spies, the Tom Hanks espionage vehicle, and I realised: I know embarrassingly little about the Cold War.

It’s not that I didn’t know anything. I lived through about a decade of it, for a start. But I mainly knew the big events, and mainly either as little more than names, or as set-pieces somewhat devoid of context: the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin airlift. I didn’t have a good grasp of the sweep of it, how all the pieces fitted together.

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Does liberalism need global conflict in order to thrive?

By Peter Franklin

Someone recommended to me The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis, a much-respected historian of the period. It’s not a long book – fewer than 300 pages, not counting the references and index, which isn’t much when you’re cramming in the better part of a century of complex geopolitical history. But it covers that ground brilliantly. It doesn’t travel in strict chronological order, but breaks the narrative up into various themes that Gaddis considers relevant, such as “Command vs Spontaneity”, on the differences between the two ideologies that faced each other, or “Actors”, on the individual men and women (Reagan, Gorbachev, Thatcher, Walesa, John Paul II) who “widened the range” of historical possibilities and helped bring the conflict to an end. It’s a brilliant, quick overview of a vital part of history.

While it was fascinating, though, it only really went back to 1917, and, when in passing it described Lenin’s accession to power as a “coup d’etat” rather than a popular movement, it occurred to me that I didn’t know much about the Russian Revolution either. So I looked on Amazon, which recommended Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy. That was a very, very different book – 900 pages, and rather than skimming over decades in a few pages, it might, for example, spend a similar number of pages examining serfs’ farming techniques in a particular village a few miles outside Moscow in 1888. It was, it should be admitted, a fair old slog, and I kept getting bogged down and wandering off to re-read old Iain M Banks books. But I know an awful lot more about the Russian Revolution than I used to. If you’re in the market for a properly in-depth discussion, it’s worthwhile.

Suggested Reading

Today's voguish communists should remember Budapest

By James Bloodworth

A similar journey happened to me with the English reformation. I started by reading Dissolution, book one of CJ Sansom’s Shardlake series, about a 16th-century lawyer whom Thomas Cromwell asks to solve a murder. Then I read book two, and then books three to six. They’re gripping and evocative, if a little silly, and I was hooked. Having done that, on the recommendation of a friend I read An Instance of the Fingerpost, by Iain Pears, set in the aftermath of the English Civil War, which similarly revolves around politics and murder, but is a much cleverer and more moving work.

But, once again, I realised: I don’t know enough about the English reformation. In fact, I don’t know enough about British history in general. I’ve spent a lot of my life reading about science, but very little about history. So I embarked on Simon Schama’s splendid A History of Britain (volume 1), which takes us from Stone Age settlements to the last days of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the First (spoiler: she dies at the end).

More Christmas Reading

Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

I said at the beginning that I found these books oddly heartening. And I did. Because although we think we’re divided as a society now, with Brexit and the culture war, at least we’re not as divided as Tudor England, when the Protestant/Catholic divide nearly drove us to civil war on several occasions (and arguably did, depending on whether you count the Pilgrimage of Grace and the other rebellions against the crown as “civil wars”). And we don’t have the tsarist Third Section secret police, or the Soviet Cheka, or William Cecil’s network of informers, listening to whispers from neighbours about whether we’ve ever spoken ill of the Tsar or Comrade Stalin or Queen Bess. And even though we think we live in a dangerous time, we no longer have two impossibly powerful states staring at each other through the radar screens of nuclear missiles, fingers on the buttons.

Maybe this is naive. I’m a naturally optimistic person; maybe someone else, of a more pessimistic – or as they would see it, realistic – disposition, would read the same books and think “this shows us how easy it is to go from this world of ease and peace to darkness and violence”. The question, perhaps, is whether we should assume that the (relatively) peaceful time we live in is now the norm, and we have left that darkness in our past, or whether it is a thin veneer that we have built over a pit of despair and that could be stripped away at any moment.

But for me, at least, it felt like a reminder. Things aren’t perfect now. But human progress is real, and we have made the world a lot better than it was 50, or 100, or 500 years ago.

#MeToo is about saying: this happened to me, I’m not lying, I’m not mistaken, I’m not exaggerating; it was abuse, and it doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. Here is my truth.

More Christmas Reading

The writer whose books simply have to be shared

By Polly MacKenzie

Sharing our truth is powerful and important, but there are many stages still to go before we find peace (forget about resolution, justice or karma!). Luckily, there are many books that can help this process.

My #MeToo story is called ‘Emotional Violence and Social Power’ and while I don’t have the space, strength or tears to go over everything that’s happened since I wrote it, I want to share some of the books that I’ve read since. I have no idea when or if true recovery will ever come, but the books I’ve named here, none of which are self-help books and all of which are written by experts in their field, are valuable reads. All the books take a holistic view, looking at the psychology, physiology, sociology and the cultural ramifications of aggression, survival, and the search for justice and emancipation from the triggering, flashbacks, nightmares and other effects of trauma.

Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery is an international bestseller and the definitive book on PTSD. Be prepared to cry. It’s a wrenchingly honest, compassionate and honourable read, written with deep understanding. Alongside that I would recommend several complementary classics: Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps The Score and Babette Rothschild’s The Body Remembers both examine how psychological pain is held in the body as well as the mind.

More Christmas Reading

Understanding the 'gilets jaunes'

By John Lichfield

I also strongly recommend Betrayal Trauma by Jennifer Freyd, which looks at the effects of detachment, abandonment, abuse of trust and violation in childhood. Freyd is a real buzz-name at the moment. The aptness of her acronym for the behaviour of wrong-doers when confronted, DARVO – Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender – is evident in the reactions of high-profile abusive men as they are brought to account.

While I don’t think it’s our responsibility to psychoanalyse our aggressors or listen to their excuses, there are some fascinating books on abusers. They make for a grisly, shocking and – be warned – sometimes triggering read. Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door is a sensational introductory book and a good starting point.

For anyone who has survived an abusive relationship, there are some very striking and (again) classic works: Power and Control by Sandra Horley, Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft and From Charm To Harm by Gregory Zaffuto are all precise examinations of abusers who are often glib and charming on the surface and who rely on control, gaslighting, isolation and threats to first psychologically manipulate and then physically terrorise their victims.

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The fascist tendency sweeping the world

By Bidisha

Finally, as awareness of coercive control and abuse develops, I want to recommend a remarkable memoir by Helen Walmsley-Johnson. Look What You Made Me Do is a survivor’s memoir written with depth, literary flair, candour and clarity by one of the most insightful journalists working today.

When I read these books, I cried with pain, recognition, admiration and gratitude for these writers’ wisdom and compassion.

The author, Edouard Louis, is 26 years old. His first successful book, The End of Eddy, published in 2014, was translated into 20 languages. Although classified as a “novel”, it was not truly a work of fiction.

The book was a laconic, bleak, sometimes lyrical description of the life of a young, gay man growing up in a violent, drunken, racist and gay-hating, working class family in post-industrial northern France. The young man, the Eddy Bellegueule (‘Eddy beautifulface’) of the original French title, was Edouard Louis himself.

His latest book, Qui a tué mon père, can be read as an apology for the first. It describes the struggles for survival and self-respect of his father – a factory worker forced to work as a cleaner after an industrial accident.

Suggested reading

The brutal truth about forgotten France

By Douglas Murray

This short book – 76 pages in the original French – describes the love-hate relationship between a drunken, gay-baiting, blue collar father and an effeminate son. It also accuses by name a series of French politicians, from Jacques Chirac to Emmanuel Macron, of making brutal decisions which devastated the life of the father and, by extension, all people who live on the periphery of thriving metropolitan France.

In both books, Louis makes it clear that, as a child and as young man before he escaped to the gay and literary scene in Paris, he feared and detested his papa. “As a child I used to pray as I came home from school, let him not be there, let him not be there, let him not be there.”

As the short book progresses, it becomes a Zola-like catalogue of accusation against a supposedly heartless French state and cuts in its welfare system. Louis’s father suffered a serious back injury at work but was forced to take a job as a cleaner on Euros 700 a month by welfare reforms imposed by Nicolas Sarkozy. “Nicolas Sarkozy broke my father’s back,” Louis writes.

Emmanuel Macron introduced a five euros a month cut in benefits last year which was tiny but important to his father. “Macron thinks that the poor are too rich and the rich are not rich enough,” Louis writes. “Macron took the food out of your mouth.”

Suggested listening

What's driving this French revolution?

By John Lichfield

Some of this is absurd. The French welfare system remains one of the most generous in the world. Louis’s success as a writer means that he is now part of the thriving metropolitan world which the yellow vest rebels despise. The book reads, in part, as a cry of guilt by a man who escaped a life of brutal poverty but does not want to be accused of despising the people that he left behind.

The book is compelling all the same. It powerfully conveys the rancour and sense of injustice of the peripheral, struggling France which spawned the gilets jaunes movement. It also explains the extreme violence of some of the protests.

In all his works Louis describes the everyday brutality of the village in the northern Somme department where he grew up. Of his mother, he says: “You never called violence violence. You called it life.”

More Christmas Reading

The writer whose books simply have to be shared

By Polly MacKenzie

But the best book published in France last year is by Philippe Lançon, and would not have been published in Britain or the United States. It defies all publishers’ categories and expectations. Hence, its brilliance.

Philippe Lançon, a journalist and writer, was one of the few people to survive the jihadist attack on the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. His jaw and lower face were smashed by bullets. He spent 10 months in hospital and endured 17 operations to reconstruct his face.

His book, Le Lambeau, ‘the rag’, is also a reconstruction. It describes in a controlled jumble of lengthy digressions the author’s life and career up to the attack; his visit to the theatre the night before; life at Charlie Hebdo; the attack itself and his long months in hospital.

The effect is to wire the reader into the stream of consciousness of a man lying in a hospital bed. Extraordinary.

To read more of John Lichfield’s reporting on the gilets jaunes, click here

That unplaceable familiarity is exactly how I feel about the voice of the writer Anne Fadiman. When I open a book of her writing, it’s like starting up a conversation we’ve been having for years, over cups of tea and glasses of wine at a worn out kitchen table. I’ve bought so many copies of her two little books of essays – Ex Libris and At Large and At Small – I’ve lost count. As soon as I have a copy, I think of someone new I want to bring into the conversation, and I give it away.

If you like reading – and, as you’re currently reading an article about what to read – that’s a safe bet, you have to get these books. I don’t know anyone who writes so resonantly and intimately about the value and the meaning of words, books, reading, and writing.

Anne (in my mind, we’re pals, you see, so it’s Anne) understands the value of the book as a physical object: she tells the story in one essay of, as newlyweds, merging her book collection with that of her husband. How do you handle the duplicates? Anne will tell you. Do you group by author or by topic? Or – God forbid – by the colour of the spines? Anne will tell you.

Suggested reading

Why should a life without faith be without meaning?

By Polly MacKenzie

It’s because of Anne that my holiday reading is always a book set in my destination. This summer I read Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler while staying in Baden Baden. I read the Leopard in Sicily. I once sat in St James’ Square and read an entire Georgette Heyer novel. It’s like augmented reality: the book is more vivid as you read because the places come to live in your mind. And the place comes alive with shadows of the characters you can almost see strolling down the street.

Anne has views on grammar and punctuation, of course. She’s done a lot of thinking on the best time of day to write and what happens if you get it wrong. She knows about how to catch butterflies. She’ll share with you the luxury of riffling through a second hand bookshop; the intimacy of reading someone else’s marginalia and jottings; her nostalgia for the age of letter-writing and exactly why she’s ever so slightly in love with Charles Lamb.

When you fall in love with a writer through their words, you find yourself compelled to read everything they put their name to. Anne’s read everything by Charles Lamb. And I’ve read everything by Anne.

Suggested reading

How Advent became peak late capitalism

By Polly MacKenzie

I bought a collection of essays called The Opposite of Loneliness simply because Anne had written the foreword – and was so grateful that she had led me to it. It’s a collection of writing by a Yale student, Marina Keegan, published in her honour after her death in a car accident. It’s essential reading for anyone trying to find their place in the world (and isn’t that everyone?). It’s been five years since I opened it and yet I can still call up the emotion of my response to the titular essay in a heartbeat.

There’s one book Anne wrote herself I’d never have picked up if it weren’t for her name. The Sprit Catches You and You Fall Down is an ethnographic study of a Hmong refugee girl with severe epilepsy, and if that doesn’t sound boring to you then you’re a better person than I. I didn’t care about epilepsy and had never heard of the Hmong, but I wanted to find out what Anne thought, so I read it.

I haven’t shed as many tears over any other book. There’s one haunting passage that lives on in my soul, describing the journey of a refugee family through the mountains, starving, desperate, unarmed and pursued by war. If I have any ability to understand the enormity of the experience of life as a refugee it is thanks to this book.

Suggested reading

The invisible refugee crisis on Poland's doorstep

By Aleksandra Lipczak

Finally there’s the Wine Lover’s Daughter, a memoir of Anne’s father, which helped me love my own wine-loving father even more. Somehow Anne’s ability to translate emotion into language makes it easier to hold on to the emotions in my own heart.

And… that’s it. Anne is not prolific. She’s too busy chatting over the kitchen table, I expect, expressing wise and witty thoughts that those of us who only know her in print can only hope she’ll share one day. As I write, my shelves stand empty of Anne’s beautiful books; I must have given the latest copies away. I’ve ordered new ones. I may manage the Christmas season without turning them into presents but I’m not making any promises.