One Great Read: 2023
This week: Three leads, seven links, a podcast and a book. And who tells our stories?
Good afternoon – and a happy new year. What are your plans for 2023? One of my main aims is to send this Substack to you: every other Sunday in newsletter form, as now, along with some original pieces in the in-between weeks.
Next week, to that end, I’ll be sending you something I haven’t seen elsewhere: a list of the UK’s top 25 best-selling history authors over the past five years. The list is, as you will perhaps be unsurprised to hear, dominated by white men. They make up 18 of the 25 names. Five1 (white) women feature, along with two men of colour. The list is 92% white in a country that is 83% white, and 80% male in a country that is 51% female.
I was also fascinated to find out whose books sold, and what subjects the British public are perennially interested by (there seems to have been some major event in the late ‘30s, early ‘40s). I’ll also send you a list of the top 25 history hardbacks since 2018. If you think anyone you know would be interested in that, or in this newsletter, please do send this on. Let’s get to it.
1 — “I need immediately, immediately agency assistance.”
Here is one great read for you, by Samira Shackle, republished this week as one of the Guardian’s ten best reads of 2022. It’s long, but it’s worth it. This is a story about many things: the gullibility of a harried press, the prefabricated narratives of certain politicians, the insanity of the UK’s absent asylum system. But at root it is simply a gripping narrative that reads like a movie. (5,900 words, 18 mins)
As they approached the oil tanker, Michael was puzzled by the sight of it. The Nave Andromeda is 228 metres long, and he had never seen such a big ship. “I was thinking, what kind of boat is this? Is it a house?”
Night fell. Morning came. Michael tried not to think about falling in. But with nothing visible apart from the deep blue of open water, it was difficult to think of anything else. Proper sleep was impossible. “If you fell asleep you would fall into the water and that would be the end of your life,” John told me. “It’s just open sea, so no matter how you swim you can’t survive it.”
2 — “Those who most wish for the good of humanity are unable to diminish evil by one jot.”
“Dumb, blind love” is man’s eternal meaning. “Human history is not the battle of good against evil, but of great evils struggling to crush small kernels of kindness.” That is the truth Vasily Grossman died hoping the world would know. Jenni Russell has written a paean to his masterpiece, Life and Fate (1980) in this weekend’s Times. (1,000 words, 3 mins)
It is the winter of 1942, and in a freezing concentration camp Ikonnikov, an old Russian in ragged clothes, is sitting on bare boards writing the manifesto of his beliefs. He has been pursuing ideals all his life. He has been an orthodox Christian, a Tolstoyan, a man who believed communist agriculture would create the kingdom of God on earth.
Twenty-five years on, after the persecution of the kulaks and the Stalinist purges, and close to death himself, his faith in great causes has collapsed. The glorious principles of communism have produced great evil. … Now, Nazi Germany is dominating Europe, bringing new terror, turning the sky black with smoke from the gas ovens. And yet these crimes too, he observes, are being done in the name of good. Hitler believes he is acting with moral purpose.
3 — “What I’m looking for exactly, I have no idea”
If you can go through life without paying any attention to the array of numbers that define digital success in the modern world – follows, likes, comments – you are winning my friend. I recently re-read this piece by Eleanor Halls after starting this Substack. She captures all the tension of our increasingly quantifiable selves, by way of a personal history of digital media in the 2010s. (1,400 words, 5 mins)
During these [magazine] meetings, the shape of our ideas began to change. While in our print meetings, we would suggest pieces on trends, people, places and things we felt our readers ought to know about, our digital meetings began to invert. Instead of us predicting and curating culture, we would react to it. The internet would tell us what to do
Many publishers are [now] adopting the less is more approach, after a manic period of trying to quite literally paper the internet. But the ‘quantification’ of things, of our lives, of ourselves, has never felt more oppressive. … The more I can cram onto a list and the more I can tick off, the more I feel like I have achieved. The more ‘productive’ I feel. But it’s impossible, of course, to consume so much with any real focus, and so I consume little fragments of everything: focussing on very little, moved by very little, remembering very little. When I close my eyes it’s like my brain is heaving with imaginary tabs that I can’t close.
Bonus links
Things I only did not know until reading this Anna Leszkiewicz piece: Roald Dahl was 6’6! And jaw-droppingly anti-Semitic. In 1983 he told the New Statesman: “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity… even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason”. By 1990, he openly stated that he had “become anti-Semitic”. And yet Netflix have paid Dahl’s family $1.5bn to produce his work, with a wave of releases soon to air. (2,400 words)
There have been some great graphs going around recently showing Britain’s relative economic decline since the late 2000s, in the Economist and the FT. The FT’s graphs were put together by John Burn-Murdoch, whose blunt, damning (and data-led) view of austerity was refreshing to read. He has yet more graphs on the right’s “millennial” problem: my generation is, unlike every other, not trending to the right as we age, breaking one of the oldest rules in politics.
I enjoyed this Henry Mance interview with Nouriel Roubini. (1,600 words) People who think the world is collapsing, and have been half-right before, make good copy. Here’s another gem, by the FT’s Robert Armstrong, on not writing a book: “The point of writing a book no one will ever read is getting paid for giving speeches no one will ever listen to.”
Patrick Maguire had a good column on how Starmer may be the next Ramsey MacDonald, the forgotten fourth Labour leader to have won an election. (There are only four: Callaghan and Brown didn’t.) You could also argue MacDonald was the Nick Clegg of his day, although he didn’t, sadly, get to move on from political failure by earning £15M in a year for a company that’s lost 65 per cent of its value in 12 months.
I agree with Lara Spirit on the House of Lords: it works fine. I’d like far more crossbench commission appointments and far fewer political ones, but a lot of quiet, useful legislative work is being done in the chamber all year round. Don’t tell Gordon Brown.
Bob Iger, one of the more successful CEOs of the 21st century, has taken back control of Disney. Some people just can’t give up the game: “He was frustrated with the idleness of his post-Disney life. In early October, Mr. Iger had taken a trip aboard the Aquarius, his 150-foot yacht, around the Fijian islands and complained to friends that his wife, Willow Bay – too busy with her job – couldn’t join him.”
For more on Iger, this Ian Leslie piece from 2019 (3,000 words) is a good read: “He realised the biggest mistake he could make would be trying too hard to impress: ‘I could be insecure… or I could let my relative blandness – my un-Hollywood-ness – be a kind of mystery that worked to my advantage while I absorbed as much as I could.’”
On the New Statesman podcast, I reviewed the year in politics with Anoosh Chakelian, who I first started working with in 2014. It’s an hour long, and to my amazement it made the UK top 40 on Apple this week. But Anoosh tells me the NS often does, so as you were. If it’s of interest:
Book deck
Finally, for this week’s book deck, here’s a passage from Life and Fate itself (courtesy of Jake Wallis Simons) on the nature of time, for the first day of the year.
Do get in touch with any thoughts, links, or pieces. It was great to hear from a few readers last time. And please do forward or share this if you think anyone would find it interesting. Thank you. Have a good week.
This was down as four when I sent this email out, but I’ve since realised that a fifth female author makes the list.