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Jacqueline Rose objects to the form of funeral being arranged for Margaret Thatcher. She calls it ‘a state funeral in all but name’. It isn’t to my taste either. At the same time, neither is this passage in Rose’s column:

When Cameron describes Thatcher as Britain’s “patriot prime minister”, he is, of course, not completely wrong. In the teeth of unemployment and recession, she knew all about uniting the nation by means of war. She knew – it was one of her assets – how to excite her people through fear. She rejoiced – her word – in military victory, as if, like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, she were only too aware that violent patriotism was the best way of making an unjust ruler secure.

It’s the false pacifism of the holy leftist, in which no war is ever what it is, because it is always an expression of something else, in ideology’s habitual transfer of meanings. Not for Rose, therefore, a war to evict Galtieri and his thugs from the Falkland Islands, whose inhabitants had not invited him or the presence of Argentine occupiers either; but instead… exciting people through fear and making unjust rule secure. Rose means the unjust rule of the Conservative Party and not the rule of the military junta in Argentina. Her vision is skewed that way. And the pacifism I call false because nine times out of 10, or even 99 times out of 100, its adherent is not in fact opposed to all war, she is just opposed to those wars to which she is opposed. But when she writes about them, she writes as if war is simply exciting people through fear and all the rest of it, so that she does not have to dwell on the details of the case. Miraculously, from this, the ugliest regimes on the planet come away with a clean bill of health, while the democracies are forever guilty.

A rose by at least one other name is a blinkered ideologue. On this issue Margaret Thatcher was right.

[Spoiler herein, if this thing is capable of actually being spoiled.]

One of the worst experiences I’ve had in the cinema in recent times was going to see A Late Quartet on Saturday. It was excruciatingly awful: clichéd, plot-predictable, musically refined sensibilities for those who really know how to feel, and laid on like honey and peanut butter; with one scene in which the movie basically collapses, as mother visits daughter, just out of bed with mother’s musician colleague, to be told by daughter that mother has ruined her life. Readers, I cringe to remember it.

There is some further account of the direness by Ryan Gilbey here. Except that Gilbey makes an exception for Christopher Walken’s performance, which he calls outstanding. Don’t believe it. Walken fits right in, with his oh-so-delicate and suffering sensitivity conveyed by a sad eye and a near-sneer. You want Walken – a true veteran – then you should stick to the likes of this.

I hadn’t thought of writing anything about this, but over the last couple of days others have shown themselves interested in what I might have to say – as if normblog were a national newspaper, which it isn’t. I have, in the past, made it plain that I was no fan of the late Mrs Thatcher, though with one area of exception. What I feel impelled to say by some of the press and internet discussion of the last few days, however, is pretty much independent of all that.

(1) In a civilized society people owe a duty of respect to the dying, the recently deceased and the bereaved. It is a simple duty of humanity. Each of us faces his or her own death sooner or later, and routine as this is, it is also – each time – a minor tragedy: a whole life, a whole inner world, gone. Whatever differences we may have with another person, whatever dislikes, we should be able to see the irreparable loss involved and mark it appropriately. There may be exceptions to this norm – for mass murderers and the like – but they are few, and should not include democratically elected politicians within one’s own community, however much they may have been hated by their opponents.

(2) This duty of respect does not extend to having to speak respectfully or uncritically of a recently deceased individual’s political or other public record. Why should it? A person’s death is typically the time when his or her life is written about and assessed most actively. Some of the assessments are positive and no one asks that these should be toned down or made neutral. There is, equally, no reason for negative, or disparaging, even damning, judgements of the same record to be avoided. It is a political or other reputation and legacy that is being judged, and it would be ‘stacking the deck’ of public discussion to regard the expression of positive viewpoints about the life of the deceased as legitimate but critical opinions as out of order.

(3) To publicly rejoice at the death of a democratic political opponent, talk of dancing on her grave, hold street parties for the occasion, and so forth, is contemptible. It says more about the morality inspiring those who engage in such activities than it does about the object of them. Consider that one day it will be you who are dying, and whatever you have done or failed to do in your life, you will deserve the love of those who feel it for you and something better than cruel glee from those who don’t.

(4) For, notice that Margaret Thatcher was not still prime minister on the day she died. Her death wasn’t instrumental in ending her period of power. So joy in seeing the back of her in that sense doesn’t come into it. The day she stepped down as PM is already more than two decades behind us – a day on which many, including me, were delighted to see her go. But the power she wielded and what she wielded it for can’t possibly justify the rejoicing now.

(5) And notice, too, that Thatcher’s political legacy, the continuing influence of what she did in office, is not altered one way or another by her death. It will continue to make its way in the world, as also to be opposed there, for a good while yet. The expression of public enjoyment has no possible justification, therefore, on these grounds either.

(6) No, when Margaret Thatcher died she was an old and ill woman, with people around her who cared about her. To take pleasure at this is an inhumanity that does no credit to those who so indulge themselves. They forget the simplest and most enduring of human truths for an ugly temporary pleasure.

[As signalled here a few days ago, I’m now posting a first excerpt from the joint paper by Mark Harvey and me with the above title. The excerpt below comes from the opening of section I. There’s a link to a full PDF version of the paper at the end of this post. I’m omitting footnotes from the excerpt here, but these are to be found in the full version. – NG.]

In the present time of financial crisis and economic downturn, there has been renewed interest in Marx’s thought and much discussion of its relevance to current problems. The interest centres, for obvious reasons, on his major economic treatise, Capital. That the three volumes of this work and the related manuscripts – the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value – yield insights regarding both the periodic instability of capitalist economies and the maldistribution of the burdens of economic crisis is not to be doubted. At the same time, it is hard to think of a period since Marx’s death when Marxist movements and organizations in the world’s wealthiest countries were weaker than they are now. More generally, the global left is not well-stocked with practical strategies – strategies for moving towards alternative forms of economy and social organization – that look like being able to persuade Western electorates.

The need for a critical renewal of Marx’s materialist theoretical legacy, and for its application to contemporary societies, is as pressing as it has ever been. Everywhere the material basis of human life is called to mind: in concerns about climate change; in problems of the availability and the cost of food; in issues of land use, the control of water, and the price of oil. The materialist conception of history, as it came to be called, may sometimes have been formulated one-sidedly by Marx, Engels and the first generations of their followers, but its focus on the material infrastructure of social and political order remains indispensable both for understanding where humankind now stands and for any realistic projection of how to maintain the movement of historical progress in forms that can be defended as increasingly just.

One thing that is not helpful in this context, however, is a blank reassertion of the validity of Marx’s most central economic categories for the analysis of global capitalism. Capital remains a work of fruitful – particular – explanatory hypotheses: hypotheses regarding, for example, the underlying causes of instability and crisis, the tendency towards the concentration of capital, the persistent production and reproduction of unemployment, the restlessly innovative drive transforming and retransforming technical processes of production and, more generally, social relations at large, and the globalizing dynamic as capitalist imperatives are pressed across national and regional boundaries. It contains the wherewithal for explaining why the geographical limits sometimes imagined for capitalist markets can generally be offset by the creation of fresh consumer needs through the invention of new types of product. Marx may not have anticipated the full extent of this phenomenon, but he understood its potential.

On the other hand, the value theory that is central to the architecture of Capital and to the whole of Marx’s mature theoretical enterprise is not defensible. On his own account of things, Marx set out to ‘reveal the economic law of motion of modern society’ and yet he could not show how labour-determined values, as defined and expounded in the first volume of his major work, were translated into the mechanisms of price and exchange in actual capitalist markets. This difficulty has long been known about under the name of the ‘transformation problem’. We mention the latter here only in passing, since it is our contention that the weaknesses of Marxian value theory are more fundamental and incapacitating than are captured by the statement of that problem. Still, the labour-value-price nexus within Marxian theory remains the site of a key difficulty for those who continue to affirm the validity of Marx’s central categories, and yet it is a difficulty all too often left unaddressed by them.

We will cite as exemplifying this omission recent books by three veteran Marxists: Terry Eagleton, Frederic Jameson and David Harvey. These are writers of varied intellectual styles; they address their readers in different tones and idioms. We draw attention only to the common feature uniting them (apart, that is, from their being all writers of established reputation within the stream of contemporary Marxist thought). That common feature is that all three write as if the explanatory success of Marx’s theory of value for understanding capitalism needs no defence; as if it can just be taken for granted.

The book by Terry Eagleton to be discussed here bears a title of rebarbatively totalizing implication: Why Marx Was Right. Despite the title, Eagleton does not in fact claim that Marx never went wrong. He allows in the book’s preface, as well as signalling here and there throughout, areas of doubt about or disagreement with Marx’s ideas. Eagleton’s purpose is no more, he says, than to take ten of the most standard criticisms of Marx and to try to refute them. Nowhere in this exercise, however, does Marxian value theory put in an appearance for analytical appraisal. Of course, Eagleton is not a political economist, and it may be thought acceptable for him to choose his themes according to what he knows most surely. Yet it is clear that he regards Marx as having provided, all in all, the best intellectual starting point for understanding modern capitalism, and it is hard to understand how this claim can be sustained without any defence of Marxian value theory. Sparing himself the effort of such a defence, Eagleton nonetheless lets slip that, as far as he is concerned, Marx’s concept of value may be taken as being valid. For, as he writes in the preface already mentioned, ‘Marx was the first… to show how it [capitalism] arose, by what laws it worked, and how it might be brought to an end’ (emphasis ours). The verb ‘to show’ is factive: Eagleton’s contention, therefore, is not one about what Marx merely set out, or hoped, to do; it is a claim about what he putatively achieved. But that claim cannot be rationally defended except by a defence of the central notion with which Marx undertook to explain ‘by what laws’ capitalism worked. So there is a hole at the very heart of Eagleton’s book, purporting as it does to convince its readers why Marx was (mostly) right, but without any attempt to vindicate by argument the most pivotal concepts relied on by Marx in his presentation of capitalism.

That book does at least have the merit of being written in a language which is clear and easy to comprehend. The same cannot be said of Frederic Jameson’s Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One. This is a commentary many readers will find impenetrably obscure and written as if addressed to a circle of initiates in some arcane cult. One of the few points it does register clearly, all the same, is the one we have identified in Eagleton: namely, that Marx exposed the inner laws governing the operation of capitalism. Jameson is explicit about what stands at the centre of these laws. ‘[T]he theory of value’, he writes, ‘… secures the existence, behind all appearances of price and market exchange, of those deeper laws which it is the vocation of Marxian theory to bring to light’. The vocation of Marxian theory – but does Marxian theory succeed in this vocation? One must make one’s way through more than a hundred pages of further abstruse commentary before discovering that the author will simply dodge the question. It is not his purpose, Jameson says, ‘to defend the “truth” of Capital from its anti-Marxist enemies’. (He betrays there, incidentally, a certain supposition about the qualifications he requires for inclusion of others within the Marxist fold.) It is not his purpose to do that, because Capital‘s critics, Jameson declares, subscribe to a reflection theory of truth, whereas the work ‘stands or falls as the representation of a system’. That is it, all of it: the author’s entire attempt to deal with the issue of validating Marx’s most fundamental concept, a concept that according to his belief secures the existence of capitalism’s deeper laws. He brushes aside the issue with no more than a glancing reference to clashing epistemological assumptions.

Finally, David Harvey who, like Eagleton and unlike Jameson, respects some norms of clarity of exposition, is similarly evasive. In his A Companion to Marx’s Capital he, too, is committed to the idea that, embracing science, Marx undertook ‘a mode of investigation and inquiry that can uncover the deep structure of capitalism’. As Harvey also refers to this structure, it is a ‘deep value structure’. Again, however, one is entitled to ask if Marx’s mode of investigation not only can but actually did uncover the deep structure of capitalism – a structure which might be shown to be significantly determinative of the relevant object of explanation (capitalism itself) and consequently capable of explaining it. Harvey does address this question at one point, if only indirectly and whether or not he is aware that that is what he is doing. Observing that a price can be put on things which are not the product of labour, he writes: ‘if prices can be put on anything independent of their value, and if they can in any case quantitatively fluctuate all over the place independent of [labour-determined] value, then why is Marx so fixated on the labor theory of value?’ The answer Harvey gives to this question refers to the material basis of life, to the real transformation that labour effects upon nature and which is crucial to human existence. As he writes: ‘if everybody tried to live off the spectacle of waterfalls or through trading in conscience and honor, no one would survive’.

Intended as support for a specifically labour theory of value, this suggestion is philosophically inept. It appeals to entities and processes which certainly do include human labour and its transformative effects, but which include, as well, material inputs to the production process that are not productive of value according to Marx: natural resources, raw materials, tools, machines and so forth. Harvey’s answer to the question he himself poses, in other words, does not distinguish why, in Marx’s theory, the expenditure of human labour-power should, but the use of, say, horse power, or of the natural force of a river, should not, yield objective economic value. And this is as much as he has to offer in support of a thesis informing his entire presentation of Capital, the thesis that Marx found the way to uncovering capitalism’s deep structure.

There is, to be sure, nothing wrong with the idea that in the social sciences explanation may uncover laws and/or structures which are not immediately visible to the participants in the social processes under investigation but are the product of research and analysis and the construction of theoretical hypotheses. But the mere enunciation of some supposed law or deep structure is not sufficient unto itself. Its claims to intellectual attention, to actually being explanatory of what it is thought to explain, requires an effort of argument, of following through to show how the surface appearances of social life (to put this in the way Marx himself sometimes put it) can be traced back to their determinant causes; or conversely to show how – that is, by what paths and mechanisms – these causes work through to the actual consequences, events, tendencies or what have you, of the real world. For two other possibilities have always to be considered than that an effectively determining and explanatory underlying structure has been identified. First, it is possible that the structure hypothesized does not exist and so can explain nothing. Second, it is possible that even though it does exist it either does not explain anything or does not explain what those invoking it think it explains.

Both of these abstract possibilities are pertinent to the case in hand. Marxian value is defined as being determined by the labour-time on average socially necessary in given conditions to reproduce some particular commodity, and prices are held by Marx to fluctuate around this value (in his simpler model) or to be governed by it in a more indirect but not fully specified way (in the more complex model). As readers of Capital will know, however, one crucial commodity, at the very centre of his account of exploitation, is labour-power itself, the capacity of the labourer to work. Apart from several other difficulties with Marx’s theoretical treatment of labour-power – difficulties we shall come to shortly – the value of labour-power is held by him to include a historical and moral element, since it is not a matter simply of brute natural fact what workers require in order to be in a ‘normal’ condition of health and capacity when presenting themselves ready for work; there is, as we might say today, a cultural component involved. But this means that identifying a value of labour-power that is, so to say, ‘underneath’ its varying prices is no longer a viable enterprise. There is no determinate value of labour-power definable separately from the price of labour-power and its fluctuations – in other words, separately from actual wage levels – because it will be impossible to bypass the latter in settling what is the historical and moral component in the needs of the labourer.

Even if this problem – a disabling circularity – did not exist, and value could be arrived at as Marx says it is, there is the second possibility to be faced: which is that, existent as they may be, labour-determined values do not uniquely determine price, because price is set by a number of factors, the labour-content of the commodity only one amongst them. Marx, as it happens, was perfectly well aware of this when he needed to be: he accepted that a produced object which is ‘useless’ (for which there is no demand) has no value at all, however much labour may be embodied in it. But he thought to restrict, without more ado, the influence of social utility and demand on the determination of value to that one effect. Why usefulness and effective demand may determine whether a commodity has any value at all but not, also, contribute to determining how much value it has, is a question to which he gave no persuasive answer.

In any case, the books by Eagleton, Jameson and Harvey which we have referred to are as if innocent of the existence of such questions, while putting forth knowledge claims on behalf of Marx’s Capital that depend on the questions having been addressed and satisfactorily answered. From reading those three books one might think it were enough simply to assert that labour is the unique source of economic value, without having to go to the trouble of showing how prices in the real world are governed by labour-determined values. Yet unless this can be shown, Marx cannot have revealed ‘the economic law of motion of modern society’.

[I shall be posting further excerpts in the days ahead. For the full paper (PDF), ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘, just click through the link. See also ‘On working together‘.]

The Baltimore Sun has asked a few local authors to ‘share the titles they’re enjoying right now’. One of them writes:

I’ve just finished Kent Haruf’s “Benediction” – one of the best books I’ve read all year… I found it both a delight to read and a heartbreaker.

It’s good to have my own opinion of the book thus endorsed. And the local Baltimore writer who’s doing so? A certain Anne Tyler. (Thanks: JL.)

It’s a rule you can ignore. I bring you the wonderful pedantry of Oliver Kamm from Saturday’s Times (£), to explain why you can. Oliver is discussing the following sentence from the paper: ‘Iain Duncan Smith has asserted that he could live on benefits of £53 a week as he defended sweeping welfare cuts which critics claim will disproportionately affect society’s most vulnerable’:

The “that/which rule” is like the purported prohibition on split infinitives: some people feel strongly about it, and it’s thus worth knowing, but it has no real grammatical or stylistic justification. My reason for discussing it is to explain that it’s a waste of time to worry about the choice of “that” or “which” as a relative pronoun. Your meaning will be clear with either, so long as you are careful about punctuation.

The rule concerns what are known as relative clauses. Take this sentence: “The article, which the greedy columnist submitted before rushing to the bakery, was full of mistakes.” The words between the commas form a relative clause. If you deleted them, the sentence would not only make complete grammatical sense but also convey the essential point that the article was full of mistakes. The clause provides supplementary information about the sentence’s subject (namely, the article).

Now consider this sentence: “The newspaper that employs the greedy columnist has run out of blueberry muffins.” The words “that employs the greedy columnist” also form a relative clause. But here it’s not just additional information: it specifically identifies which newspaper it is that has run out of blueberry muffins.

A relative clause that adds extra information, not essential to understanding the sentence, is called non-restrictive. In the sentence about the error-ridden article, it’s separated from the main clause by a pair of commas. These function as a pair of brackets would do.

A relative clause that is essential to determining the reference is known as restrictive. It isn’t just any newspaper that has run out of blueberry muffins: it’s the one employing the greedy columnist. To denote that the clause is restrictive, there are no commas.

Here’s where the “that/which rule” comes in. Some style guides insist on “that” rather than “which” in a restrictive clause, and “which” rather than “that” in a non-restrictive clause. They would hence fault our sentence about Mr Duncan Smith, in which the critics’ claim is essential to identifying which sweeping welfare cuts we’re talking about.

I don’t agree that the relative pronoun “that” is even desirable, let lone necessary, in our sentence. It’s unnecessary because the absence of a comma before “which” makes it clear that the clause is restrictive. It’s undesirable because we’ve already used “that” (as a conjunction, reporting Duncan Smith’s statement) earlier in the sentence. It would be clumsy to say “that” again, this time as a relative pronoun.

Got that? To avoid repetition of ‘that’, it’s worth using a ‘which’.

Saul Smilansky is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Haifa, Israel. He is the author of Free Will and Illusion (Oxford University Press, 2000), 10 Moral Paradoxes (Blackwell 2007), and numerous philosophical articles. Below Saul discusses C.P. Snow’s Variety of Men.

Saul Smilansky on Variety of Men by C.P. Snow

Could a classic work, in this time and age, remain unrecognized and unread? I believe that C.P. Snow’s Variety of Men is such a modern classic. Indeed, I think it can make a strong claim to being one of the greatest collections of biographical essays ever written. Hence, in choosing this volume to write about, I am not merely taking up one of my favourite books but also seeking to rescue what I think is a true masterpiece from near oblivion. I have never met anyone who has read it, so I hope you will excuse my missionary zeal. If my assessment is correct, this neglect is outrageous. In part, it probably follows from the rapid decline in Snow’s literary stock: a well-known author in the 1960s and 1970s, whose long series of novels Strangers and Brothers even became a TV series, he has largely been forgotten. Some of Snow’s prose is definitely worth reading. The Masters, for example, is a tale of college intrigue and a splendid read. He was, however, much more than a novelist. A science don at Cambridge, Snow was then made responsible, in what must have been an inspired move, for hiring scientists during World War II, and became involved in highly interesting developments such as radar and the beginning of nuclear weapons. After the war, he headed the British Civil Service, was knighted in 1957 and granted a life peerage in 1964. This rare combination of an active writer who is also a practising scientist and knowledgeable about the Corridors of Power (the name of one of his novels and a term he apparently coined) is what makes Variety of Men such a wonderful book.

It is about nine people: scientists Rutherford and Einstein, mathematician G.H. Hardy, writer H.G. Wells and poet Robert Frost, statesmen Lloyd George, Churchill and Dag Hammarskjöld, and Stalin. Snow knew all but the last one personally, some of them quite well. Thus, he can report first-hand what Lloyd George really thought about his friend and ally Churchill, or tell us about a conversation on suicide he had with H.G. Wells late one night over whisky. Snow’s writing is interesting and dynamic, yet leisurely and measured. He brings to the essays a lifetime of experience and reading, without being ponderous. He manages to be opinionated and judgemental (a must in this genre), while remaining broad-minded and fair. Although he is sensible and judicious, mischief is always around the corner. A crusty realist with few illusions about human beings or society, Snow unequivocally bestows praise and admiration whenever merited. Psychologically acute, perceptive and insightful, he is unbeatable as a judge of character. Relishing the peculiarities of personality and circumstance, he nevertheless seeks the broader insight. Variety of Men is a master class in biography, covering a most diverse and enigmatic group of men. Only someone like Snow could carry it through with such authority.

I have lost track of the number of times I have read the book over the years. Unconsciously it was likely an inspiration for my own collection of philosophical essays 10 Moral Paradoxes. Variety of Men showed me that one could conceivably say a lot about many diverse topics in a small space, capturing the complexity, subtlety and oddity of life.

My favourite essay is the one on the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy. Snow takes us along to their cricket matches, and explains that he owes this friendship to Hardy’s hunger for company knowledgeable about the game. You soon feel that you know this fascinating person, after having had Hardy’s unusual personality compared to Einstein’s, learned his life story and been told of his discovery of the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan (a very moving tale). In the process, you learn about English public school education, Cambridge between the wars, and the difficulties of growing old for creative people of a certain temperament. Here is Snow on the celebrated undergraduate Mathematical Tripos degree. After explaining its emphasis on technical mastery over creativity, he writes:

Colleges had celebrations when one of their number became Senior Wrangler: the first two or three Wranglers were immediately elected Fellows. It was all very English. It had only one disadvantage, as Hardy pointed out with his polemic clarity, as soon as he became an eminent mathematician and was engaged, together with his tough ally Littlewood, in getting the system abolished: it had effectively ruined serious mathematics in England for a hundred years.

After reading this essay, I rushed to order Hardy’s book A Mathematician’s Apology, only to be disappointed. Hardy is an elegant writer, but Snow gives us a far better sense of Hardy in his essay than Hardy managed to do in a whole book. Something similar can be said of many of the essays. I have read many attempts to understand Einstein’s personality. Snow does not find him easy to fathom and struggles to the end of the essay to unearth the right verb to describe him. (I won’t give the game away.) But after reading Snow, I felt I could indeed understand Einstein far better than ever before.

In Variety of Men we learn not only about the nine people that Snow devotes chapters to but, to some extent, about a tenth one as well – Snow himself. He is always present, with a keen, at once ironic and sympathetic, interest in his subjects, in their uniqueness, and in figuring out what they are really like and how they became what they became. With rewards so substantial, an occasional conceit can be readily excused. Snow offers the inimitable wealth and variety of his experience, a natural tough-mindedness strengthened by the need to raise himself up from modest beginnings, a sharp and broad intellect, and the insights of a careful lifetime reader, all united by the fruits of an integrated sensibility. Even when he is telling an anecdote or giving a personal impression, we feel he is a thoughtful and learned man seeking a more general lesson about life or society. And all of it with a light touch. Reading the essays, the reader should enjoy him or herself while gaining in wisdom. It is typical of Snow to ask which one of the nine men was the best company (he ranks Hardy first, Frost second, Lloyd George third). It is a privilege to share his. Incidentally, I am not aware of any good biography of Snow. Variety of Men seems to be out of print. Try to find a copy.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

Coming soon here: a paper jointly written with my friend Mark Harvey, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, where he is the Director of CRESI, Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation. Our paper is entitled ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’. It is the result of nearly two years of discussion between us, and common work, on the strengths and weaknesses of Marx’s political economy – including the labour theory of value – and the general directions that need to be taken to move forward from it.

‘Marx’s economy and beyond’ is some 23,000 words long. I mean to feature a few excerpts from it on normblog, as well as providing, for those who want to read the whole thing, a link to the full PDF version. The paper will in due course be crossposted to the CRESI website. See also ‘On working together‘.

Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack is about to celebrate its 150th edition, and the Times has marked this with a special supplement (£). Quite right too. On such an occasion there should be bugles and bells; a symphony orchestra; choirs. How to convey to the non-cricket lover what a wealth is contained between those covers? As John Woodcock (aka the Sage of Longparish) attests, every devotee of the book has his or her inaugural edition (£):

The 1933 Wisden, the first I came to know off by heart, ran to 1,031 pages. Today it tops 1,500. Such was the hold the 1933 Wisden had over me that one of my school reports that year warned it was high time Hillard & Botting…, the primary Latin textbook, got more of a look-in.

Mine was the 1956 edition, two among its five ‘Cricketers of the Year’ my boyhood heroes – D.J. McGlew and H.J. Tayfield. But I also cannot hold back from mentioning the 1998 edition, in which, on page 1394, the then editor Matthew Engel wrote of Ashes ’97, the book I co-authored with my buddy Ian Holliday: ‘I have a curious feeling that this book will weather well as a social document of cricket-watching.’

If I were to say that being mentioned in Wisden realized an old dream of mine, it wouldn’t be the truth. Never at any point had I dreamed of making an appearance in this sacred volume. I am there now in perpetuity. Yes, I know, Ozymandias and all that; but bloody hell, Wisden.

It’s called music by Mr Ben Webster, and you can’t do better than to resume on a note like his.