The Joy Of Reading

That's reading books, not Reading the place, though I'm sure it's perfectly nice - I've only ever been to the railway station.

I bought a couple of new books last week, both (relatively) recently published and on the respective topics of Shakeapeare and Bagehot. So interesting to me, if perhaps not to many others. First up is Tyrant: Shakespeare on Power (for some unfathomable reason Shakespeare on Politics in the US) by the much-lauded Stephen Greenblatt - he is credited as the father of New Historicism, not, I suspect, that this bothers you greatly. Anyway this latest little scholarly pot-boiler is clearly written in a brilliant hissy-fit about the rise of Trump. It is tremendously well done and the ghastly Trump never even gets a direct mention. Clever. It is a towering exercise in American Liberal ire. There is a brisk analysis of the Henry VI trilogy which, just as the author intends, has you sitting there thinking 'that's so true and so modern.' How about this?

Populism may look like an embrace of the have-nots, but in reality it is a form of cynical exploitation.

What a great sound-bite that makes. Of course it has liberal snobbishness coursing through it but we can leave that for another day.

The other, and weightier, tome is Bagehot: the Life and Times of the Gretaest Victorian by James Grant. Yet more proof that the best Bagehot scholarship these days comes from across the Atlantic. In truth it is mildly irksome to find another Bagehot biography appearing after you have finished drafting your own chapter on the Bagehot literature. Hey ho. 

Grant's bias is towards my boy Walter as an economist and I think he gets him right. Bagehot can come across as a right old smart-arse (Grant would probaly say 'smart-ass' if descending to my level) but you have to admire his sheer energy as a writer and you have to accept (perhaps grudgingly) that he was often onto something. Anyway I was amused to encounter the pithy dissection repeated below of the cycle of boom and bust that is, to this ignoramus at least, the key to the pseudo-science of economics. Those of you with keen memories will remember that good old Gordon Brown abolished boom and bust - bet you wish you'd never said that Gordon. 

Overstone - like Bagehot, a clarifier of complex ideas - was among the first to identify the cycle of boom and bust, which he described  in these words in 1837: "First we find it in a state of quiescence - next improvement, - growing confidence, - prosperity, - excitement, - overtrading, - convulsion, - pressure, - stagnation, - distress, - ending again in quiescence. 

Plus ca change? 

I recommend both books.