How to Beat Sir Humphrey: Every Citizen’s Guide to Fighting Officialdom by Antony Jay

In my undergraduate days, I wrote a massive honours thesis on my pet obsession at the time (and somewhat still, to this day): the 1980s satirical political comedy Yes, Minister. As part of my quest to get my hands on every bit of Yes, Minister merchandise I could find, I purchased the DVDs and the ‘Hacker diaries’, acquired a complete set of Richard Crossman’s three-volume Diaries of a Cabinet Minister (key background texts for much of the series), and managed to find the 1988 and 1989 day planners in near-mint condition. Yet I still scour the Internet in search of other items that I’m looking for…and this book was one of those items. I found it in audiobook format first before finding it in paperback — but more on that shortly.

How to Beat Sir Humphrey: Every Citizen’s Guide to Fighting Officialdom by Antony Jay

Antony Jay wrote How to Beat Sir Humphrey about a decade ago, and in it he has written a step-by-step overview of how ordinary citizens can combat government- or private finance-backed plans that they feel will be detrimental to their community — plans for development that can be as localised as an old building being torn down to make room for a supermarket, or as expansive as a proposed motorway extension. How to Beat Sir Humphrey describes how to organise an action group for best efficiency, ways to raise money and community awareness about the project, pitfalls to avoid at all cost, and how to potentially beat the local officials and the bureaucrats at their own game. One thing to note: the book is written with the intent of fighting British officialdom, so it’s possible that other countries might have different steps or bureaucratic levels that Jay doesn’t mention. But most of the strategies seem to have universal merit and application…such as festooning a local official’s car with yards and yards of ‘red tape’ as a mild protest to draw media attention to the cause.

Jay admits at the end of the book that the suggestions he gives in How to Beat Sir Humphrey are not wholly fail-proof. Sometimes, even one’s best efforts will not be successful, and the project will go through in spite of local disapproval. But he suggests that even the effort made to organise citizens in a civically responsible fashion is one of the things that strengthens our civil society, and that the game itself is really always worth the candle.

For fans of Jay’s television work, the audiobook release is an even better find than the original text itself. Why? Because the person who reads the audiobook is none other than Derek Fowlds, the actor who played high-flying civil servant Bernard Woolley with such pedantic charm in Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. Hearing Derek Fowlds reading the audiobook is an experience that almost borders on the bizarre. Listening to Bernard Woolley give you advice on how to combat Sir Humphrey Appleby and those of his ilk — you almost have to suspend disbelief in order to wrap your head around that set-up. It’s an extra little treat for those who enjoyed the original television satire.

Europe at Home: The Family and Material Culture, 1500-1800 by Raffaella Sarti

I always enjoy a good social history book, one that doesn’t necessary focus on political squabblings or the usual things that the standard historical survey books tend to cover. This one was a bit pricey when I bought it, but I think it was decent value for the cost.

Europe at Home: The Family and Material Culture, 1500-1800 by Raffaella Sarti (translated by Allan Cameron)

Raffaela Sarti’s book is translated from the original Italian, so it’s no surprise that the greater part of her research centres on the home life of Italian families throughout the time period her book covers. But Italy certainly doesn’t dominate the text — there is quite a lot of truly valuable and interesting information on the development of family structure and family life from the end of the Renaissance period through the beginning of the industrial age. Sarti touches on all the topics one might expect from a survey book: clothing, food and dietary patterns, the changing position and status of children and women in the European family, the effects of exploration of the New World on European daily life, and any number of other aspects of day-to-day existence in different regions of Europe.

Quite a few of the facts and anecdotes in the text seem almost meant for good dinner-table conversation, such as the intriguingly misogynistic reason why male cooks were vastly preferred over female cooks in most wealthy European families of the period (’Everyone knows that generally the dirtiest man is cleaner than the cleanest woman’, according to 17th-century author Francesco Tanara of Bologna’s book The City-Dweller’s Organization of a Villa). There are also any number of facts that probably shouldn’t be mentioned at table, however; certain Basque peoples believed that only mature and virile men should be allowed to participate in the process of cheese-making, since they thought that the procession of human reproduction involved a ‘coagulation’ of male seed and female menses in the womb, just as rennet coagulates milk to make cheese. Anecdotes such as these highlight Sarti’s central and rather broad thesis, which emphasises the roles played by production, consumption, and reproduction in the maintenance of European family life. Even if Sarti’s thesis seems to be a little too broad at times, the span of the survey nonetheless allows the reader to take in a wider picture of domestic life, rather than forcing the focus of the book into an overly narrow set of conclusions.

Regrettably, one of my first impressions of my edition of the book was the sheer number of typographical errors included in the pages. I can’t tell whether I’ve become more irritated by them of late or whether I’m simply noticing them more often, but I’ve also become far less forgiving of them — especially in the paperback edition of a translated book. (Thankfully, Sarti has assembled a Web page for the errata.) But I only mention them because they are a minor but noticeable distraction from what is otherwise a very good translation of a fine study in social history.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge

I picked up this book from the sale table at The Strand bookshop in New York City a few weeks ago, gleefully carrying it off for nearly a quarter of its regular retail price. An excellent find, I must say.

Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 edited by Andrew Geddes and Jonathan Tonge

The UK General Election of May 2005 was, in the observant words of Labour MP Tony Wright (Cannock Chase), ‘the election that nobody really wanted to have — not the politicians, not the media, and certainly not the electorate’. People knew that it was coming, and for the most part there was sense of resignation at what the expected outcome would be. The Labour Party would get a sharp kick in the polls (so to speak), but not really enough to completely wipe out its majority. Some seats would change hands, some MPs (almost certainly including John Prescott) would say or do things that would come back to haunt them at some point down the line, one or two constituencies would have particularly nasty campaign battles that would dominate the national news for the better part of the run-up to the election itself. And though all of these things certainly did happen, the ‘expected events’ seemed to blur together — which meant that some of the more interesting (from a political historian’s perspective) aspects of the 2005 election often happened to be overlooked.

Election synopsis books are becoming increasingly popular in the publishing business; for the 2005 General Election, I can think of at least three books I might turn to for analysis of the parties, the polls, the campaigns, and the final results. Britain Decides: The UK General Election 2005 would probably not have been the first book I’d have thought of, but after reading it there’s no doubt that it is a worthy addition to include with longstanding publications such as Dennis Kavanagh and David Butler’s British General Election series. The contributing authors have provided a set of fine essays on what one might consider the usual topics — the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat election campaigns; special points of interest regarding the election campaigns and outcomes in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; and reports on the influence of the Internet and the mainstream media outlets during the campaign. The book also has a dozen tidy and well-laid-out single-page summaries of some of the more notable election results, such as George Galloway’s upset victory over sitting Labour MP Oona King in Bethnal Green and Bow, Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble losing his seat in Upper Bann, and the late Peter Law’s protest against Labour’s all-women shortlist in Blaenau Gwent. In addition to the usual facts and figures, the book contains a reflective essay by the abovementioned Labour MP Tony Wright, providing one sitting MP’s thoughts and feelings about what it was like to be on the ground during the campaign.

Having had a little bit of experience on the ground myself at the 2005 General Election (I spent Election Night at the BBC Studios in Shepherd’s Bush, watching the results come in until the wee hours of the morning), I found Geddes and Tonge’s book to be quite fascinating. I’m not really much of a psephologist — statistics aren’t my forte, even when it comes to statistical analysis of elections — but the book is written in such a way as to be accessible to an audience that is interested in elections at a bit of a distance, away from the immediacy of the media hype and the nonstop bickering of the candidates. Even if, as the book suggests, it didn’t entirely seem as if ‘Britain’ collectively decided much of anything in May 2005 (except perhaps that Tony Blair’s days in Downing Street were numbered), this retrospective looks at some of the decisions made during the election and draws some thoughtful conclusions about the state of British politics going into Labour’s historic third term.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan

I may be able to move back up to three review posts per week fairly soon, depending on how the backlog looks. Right now I have several reviews waiting to go, so it’ll be a matter of spreading them out and pacing them accordingly.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and mystery columnist for the Washington Post, knows the importance of examining and evaluating the books that she has read over the years. Books have been the centre of her life for a number of years now, so perhaps it is only natural that she would write a book that looks at her life as a reader and how certain books and genres have shaped her reading experience and her approach to life. And in Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Corrigan attempts to explore her longstanding and complex relationship to the books in her life, from her early childhood favourites to the books she comes back to time and again as a adult. As she says in her oft-quoted introduction: ‘It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others –- even my nearest and dearest -– there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.‘ It’s a sentiment that a number of readers share, certainly.

Quite possibly the best section in the book is her paean to hard-boiled detective novels, a genre that she believes has been overlooked and underappreciated by critics and academics. Corrigan delves into the world of noir, the stories of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, and provides some interesting insights into how the traditional detective novel’s perspective on class and society makes it a quintessentially American work of fiction. She also has a few words to say about what she calls the female version of the ‘extreme-adventure story’ — where the gruelling experiences and hardships of a man climbing a mountain or facing death on a battlefield are mirrored by a those of a woman fighting to escape an abusive husband or devoting her energies to caring for an elderly relative on her own. (I’m not quite sure that I agree with all of her thoughts on this subject, but I’m still attempting to figure out where my reservations come from.)

That said, it should be noted that Corrigan’s attempt to describe her passion for books and illustrate the influence of literature on her everyday life becomes increasingly strained the farther away she goes from the books. As the distance from the literary analysis increases, the more her prose starts to drag and the less careful her word choices become. In one section, the term ‘WASP’ — with all its vaguely perjorative connotations and its feel of inverted snobbery — shows up four or five times in about as many pages as Corrigan talks about her Irish-Polish Catholic childhood and heritage. I ended up barely skimming Corrigan’s account of her travels to China to meet and bring back her adopted daughter, and the section in which she recalls her feelings of disenchantment and isolation during graduate school had me biting my lip in exasperation by the end of it. I won’t go quite as far as Corrigan herself does by summing up her book with her suggestion for a one-word negative review if Leave Me Along, I’m Reading — ‘Gladly’ — but I do think that some book-centric memoirs such as Corrigan’s have a tendency to blur the line between the books and the memoirs a little too much for my liking at times.

Travels in Hyperreality, How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, and On Literature by Umberto Eco

For today, here’s a handful of short reviews — three collections of essays and other short pieces by Umberto Eco, Italian professor of semiotics and author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.

Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco (1990)

The essays and pieces in Travels in Hyperreality often focus on Eco’s chosen field of semiotics, the study of signs and the ways in which meanings are made and understood through the use of signs and symbols. The ‘hyperreality’ that Eco refers to in the title essay is not exactly easy to explain, but in a way it can best be described by the figures in a wax museum: everything is made to be as life-like and realistic as possible, but done so in a way that the human eye and human brain cannot truly accept those wax figures as anything but fake. The long title essay looks at the hyperreality of wax museums, ‘Old West’ tourist towns, and Disneyland — in short, of many tourist attractions in America — with an intriguing academic detachment borne of many years of looking at how we as human beings define our reality.

The essays of Travels in Hyperreality were mostly written in the 1960s and 1970s, and they’re definitely dated by the examples he uses and the references he makes. Eco wonders in one essay what kind of reaction would result from an attack on a major sports field in the middle of a football game — it’s clear that the essay was written several years before the murder of the Israeli atheletes in the 1972 Munich Olympics. Readers who have little patience for Marxist interpretations of society might find certain essays problematic in that regard. But Travels in Hyperreality is for the most part just that: a collection of travels and accompanying observations about reality and about the aspects of life, both good and bad, that seem to be a little too real for comfort at times.

How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays by Umberto Eco (1994)

This book is a selection of various humourous essays and short story fragments written by Eco over the years, collected here in book form. The title essay opens the book, and in it Eco relates an odd tale of his attempts to keep a piece of fresh salmon in the mini-bar refrigerator of his London hotel room during a short stay in the city. (Not only was the attempt unsuccessful, but he also ended up with a staggering bill for all of the alcohol and beverages and nibbles he had to remove from the refrigerator in order to stuff the salmon into it each day — and he gained a bit of reputation amongst the hotel staff for extreme overindulging.) Most of the other essays are similar in tone, filled with wry observations on travel, modern technology, the weirdness of other human beings, and the busyness of everyday life in general. With subjects ranging from ‘How to Replace a Driver’s License’ (in Italy, apparently, this is almost an impossible feat) to ‘How to Buy Gadgets’ (a must-read for anyone who has boggled over a Sharper Image catalogue or one of those magazines found in the seat-pockets on airplanes), plus a few articles that are wicked parodies of nonsensical academic jargon and bureaucratese, there’s enough variety in the book to ensure that no one theme is repeated to the point of wearing out.

How to Travel with a Salmon is, I think, a very good short introduction to Eco’s brisk and clever writing style and his sense of sly and subtle humour. It definitely made me laugh out loud in places, and I spent much of the rest of the book trying and failing to keep a straight face. It’s also a very good travel book, since the essays are short enough to be read in little chunks and funny enough to be a welcome distraction from whatever craziness happens to be plaguing your immediate surroundings.

On Literature by Umberto Eco (2005)

Another collection of writings by Eco, all of a more literary and/or scholarly bent. Most of them were given as talks or written as papers for conferences, and the array of subject matter is extremely broad and…I think ‘erudite’ is probably the best word for it. There are essays about the literary style of Marx’s Communist Manifesto, observations on the use of style and symbolism in different authors’ works, an interesting essay which attempts to evaluate ideas of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ literature, and a rather critical one about the wit of Oscar Wilde (he doesn’t dislike Wilde’s aphorisms per se, but considers them more shallow and superficial than most people tend to think). More than a few of the essays, I freely admit, go over my head — primarily because in them Eco is discussing or making references to books I have not actually read or even heard of before. But they do pique my interest in the books he happens to be talking about, so perhaps one of these days I will come back to my copy of On Literature and find that something he’s written makes more sense to me at that point then it does right now.

One of the most interesting essays in this collection — my favourite, in fact — explains how he writes, or how he worked to develop the ideas for the works that he’s best known for writing (The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum in particular). The amount of time and effort Eco puts into his work really shows when he explains how he crafts his stories. One point in particular worth mentioning is how he tends to write dialogue in relation to time — if two people were walking down a corridor having a conversation, he says, and the conversation had to finish before they reached the end of the corridor, then he (as author) would have to figure out the length of the corridor so that he could time the length of the conversation in his head and adjust his characters’ walking speed accordingly. It’s this kind of detail that really make his work stand out. Speaking as someone who enjoys finding out what makes authors tick, it’s a pleasure to see in this collection of essays that Eco is also very much interested in learning about authors and the things that make them tick.

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 by Peter Hennessy

Running into a few Internet troubles with my laptop really ought to have made me more productive — less time wasted browsing for books I can’t exactly afford on Amazon.co.uk and from the London Review of Books shop, right?

Never Again: Britain 1945-51 by Peter Hennessy

At the end of World War II, one theme was very much on the minds of the people of Great Britain, from political and military leaders to old age pensioners: never again. Never again should the world have to suffer through another war like the one that had just ended. Never again should dictators-in-the-making be able to take advantage of mass unemployment that left millions of able-bodied men out of work, unable to support themselves or their families. Never again should the sick be unable to obtain medical treatment for lack of money to pay for it, or lack of doctors available to treat them. Never again should children go seriously malnourished or ill-educated, never again should working men and women have to live in shacks patched together from the rubble of bombed-out buildings. Even though food and other consumer goods were still being rationed, and the British military was spread out all over the world, Clement Attlee’s Labour Government (elected by a landslide on 5 July 1945) was determined to put Britain back together again and, in the words of William Blake, build a new Jerusalem on the Labour Party’s socialist principles. The British experience, from everyday domestic life to complicated questions of international relations, in the early postwar years is the focus of Peter Hennessy’s Never Again: Britain 1945-51.

I’ve written glowing reviews of several other books by Peter Hennessy, including The Secret State and The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945. He’s certainly one of my favourite historians of any age and period, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading any number of books and articles he’s written over the years. But Never Again, I regret to say, was a very disappointing book. In addition to the often startlingly clunky writing, the narrative had a tendency to feel disorganised and uneven, lurching along as ideas and themes were picked up for brief periods of time and then discarded. Even the sections that contain some noteworthy quotations and little-known bits of intriguing historical information have to contend with sentences such as the following: ‘Since the final end of Empire in the 1960s, the economic historians have discovered a rich seam of retrospection as they mercilessly subject this kaleidoscopic phenomenon to the spartan rigours of cost-benefit analysis.‘ Granted, this book was first written and published back in the early 1990s, but surely another readthrough would’ve flagged sentences like that one for deletion, or possibly even revision.

Authorial voice is a difficult thing to find when writing history, especially when writing for an audience that is not necessarily a specialist audience already acquainted with most of the material. When done well, it produces the kind of history book that simply immerses the reader in the time period and subject to hand. When done less than well, it makes reading a struggle and finishing a chore. As I see it, Never Again mainly has its problems in the authorial voice — the unevenness of the narrative, leaping from topic to topic and from casual conversational or anecdotal style to professorial lecturing tone without a lot of apparent thought put into smoothing the transition, makes it jarring and occasionally difficult to follow. I suppose I keep stressing my disappointment because I know that Hennessy is more than capable of drafting a truly well-written history book. I already own the next volume in this series; I’ll have to see if that one has more of the Hennessy style that I’ve grown to enjoy.

The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 by Peter Hennessy

Catching up after a few days of missed postings — I may end up switching over to a Tuesday/Sunday posting schedule after this week, just to spread out the backlog a bit.

I thought I’d posted this one already, but a look through my tags suggests that I haven’t. I’ve another Hennessy book coming up for review soon after this one, most likely on Sunday.

The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945 by Peter Hennessy

Like much of the British political system, the office of the Prime Minister (and First Lord of the Treasury) of Great Britain has been sort of cobbled together over the centuries into the form that exists today. As such, there’s an intriguing amount of flexibility in its job scope and job description that quite a lot of people don’t often notice. For instance, a prime minister doesn’t necessarily have to be the leader of the largest political party in the House of Commons — in 1940, Neville Chamberlain stayed on as leader of the Conservative Party for a few months after Winston Churchill officially became PM. A study of the office of Prime Minister in the years since World War II has to look at a subject that is deceptively complex to contemplate, all the more so because each successive PM has added his or her own interpretation of the duties and responsibilities (and perks) that come with being at the top of the greasy pole. In The Prime Minister: The Office and Its Holders Since 1945, Peter Hennessy has written a neat and very compact analysis that incorporates insight and input from a wide range of senior officials, politicians, and media people, all of whom provide a running commentary on the changes that have taken place over the years.

Interestingly, Hennessy seems to take it as a mission to ‘redeem’ premiers that perhaps haven’t been given the credit they deserve for their achievements in their time in office. He has quite a few kind words for Clement Attlee’s seemingly unflappable outlook on governing, Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s sense of duty and determination, Edward Heath’s successful European entry negotiations, and Jim Callaghan’s deep roots in the labour movement. But he’s not above castigating a prime minister for serious flaws or failings — he points out Anthony Eden’s near-monomaniacal hatred of General Nasser and Harold Wilson’s slapdash attempts to control inter-Cabinet squabbles as special examples of leadership problems. Even Winston Churchill is dismissed as having been too old and too steeped in wartime tradition to think that he could manage Britain at peace (leaving Korea and Indochina aside for the moment, that is). As for what he has to say about Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair…well, let’s just say that he thinks their approaches to Cabinet government leave much to be desired.

As a study of the premiership and as a person-by-person analysis of those who have held the office of First Lord of the Treasury since 1945, I can only say that this book is invaluable. Even if it’s occasionally a little frustrating to look at the footnotes and see ‘Private information’ as the source for a really insightful comment or quotation, it’s rather difficult to fault the breadth, depth, or quality of Hennessy’s research on this topic.

The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev

More books on espionage? Just the one left for the moment — this one’s nonfiction, at least.

Shortly after I’d first read Miranda Carter’s excellent biography of Anthony Blunt, I decided it would be a good time to return to this book, which I’d started several times but hadn’t managed to finish. I assumed that my sluggish reading pace came because I simply wasn’t devoting proper attention to it to make the reading experience worthwhile. So when I picked it up again at a point when I had more time, I ended up re-evaluating my initial reaction to the book — albeit not necessarily in the book’s favour.

The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives by Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev

Having returned to this book, I concluded that my lack of interest seems to spring from the book’s rather misleading subtitle. The Crown Jewels seems to me to be less about the actual secrets found in the archives than about the people who put those secrets there in the first place. Unfortunately, the writing style of the book doesn’t make this different topic nearly as interesting as it could be.

The Crown Jewels seems to hint that the book will be about the specific kinds of secrets passed to Soviet intelligence by various British spies and Soviet agents over the years. There are certainly enough British intelligence secrets present in the pages, but the presentation of the material is done in an awkward, jerky style that buries the secrets themselves in a hodgepodge of confusing and ill-defined codenames and often goes off on any number of tangents. Specific events of spying and theft, some were quite crucial to the expansion of the Soviet network in Britain, are picked up and dropped into the text and never really explained. Perhaps the authors presume that the reader already has some background knowledge of the history of Soviet espionage in Britain. I understood a good deal more of this book’s material on Anthony Blunt because I’d read Carter’s biography, but if I had tried to pull the information from West and Tsarev’s book and then apply it to the biography then I’d be very confused indeed. I do know that Carter consulted The Crown Jewels in the writing of the Blunt biography, and yet I have a feeling that the consultation was more for fact-checking and date-confirming purposes than for any other reason.

The best sections of this book include archival materials from formerly unaccessible KGB files — the documents are found in the appendices and block-quoted in the text itself. In my opinion, if this book was about two hundred pages longer, then it could be a remarkably impressive study of Soviet espionage in Britain from Bolshevik days until about 1960. As it is, the book reads as if it has been pared down by an overly ruthless editorial process and some less-than-careful revisions on the part of the authors. Much of the tasty meat of the spy game has been removed, leaving a jumbled heap of the bare bones of names and dates that don’t truly satisfy. A pity, really — it’s plain that there’s quite a lot of interesting information out there for those who are interested in the history of Soviet espionage in the United Kingdom.