Also Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March, Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind, Hilary Mantel, Bring Up The Bodies (soooooooooo good) and Barry Forshaw, Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction
It's been a while, must do better. Writing now was spurred on by Robert Webb on R4 reading from his excruciatingly embarrassing teenage diary. Although now my life is tracked on the Facebook timeline, maybe this is surplus to requirements. We're in a strange lull in patriotism at the moment between the highs of the jubilee and Euro 2012 and the start of the Olympics next month. Apparently the torch will be passing through Bracknell next week. It appears most Londoners are dreading it and the traffic chaos they're gleefully predicting will ensure. Already lanes have been marked with 5 rings to show they're only for use by athletes, officials and rich people. Helen's been told to work from Farnborough for the duration.
We've just got back from Cornwall where I read Rudé, Roth and the gloriously misguided Righteous Mind, about why the Left will always be less likely to appeal to working-class voters than the Right. Haidt seems to believe that because that's true of some, it's true of all; when any glance at election results will show it's a third of the working class at a maximum, and there's nothing inevitable about it. The first part of the book is brilliant at describing why so many vote against their own interests, but them makes a massive mistake in assuming from this that conservative popularity is inevitable. Ah well.
