Category: Books
My excellent Conversation with Helen Castor
Here is the audio, video, and transcript. Here is part of the episode summary:
Tyler and Helen explore what English government could and couldn’t do in the 14th century, why landed nobles obeyed the king, why parliament chose to fund wars with France, whether England could have won the Hundred Years’ War, the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV’s deposition of Richard II, how Shakespeare’s Richard II scandalized Elizabethan audiences, Richard’s superb artistic taste versus Henry’s lack, why Chaucer suddenly becomes possible in this period, whether Richard II’s fatal trip to Ireland was like Captain Kirk beaming down to a hostile planet, how historians continue to discover new evidence about the period, how Shakespeare’s Henriad influences our historical understanding, Castor’s most successful work habits, what she finds fascinating about Asimov’s I, Robot, the subject of her next book, and more.
Here is an excerpt from the opening sequence:
COWEN: Richard II and Henry IV — they’re born in the same year, namely 1367. Just to frame it for our listeners, could you give us a sense — back then, what was it that the English government could do and what could it not do? What is the government like then?
CASTOR: I think people might be surprised at quite how much government could do in England at this point in history because England, at this point, was the most centralized state in Europe, and that has two reasons. One is the Conquest of 1066 where the Normans have come in and taken the whole place over. Then, the other key formative period is the late 12th century when Henry II is ruling an empire that stretches from the Scottish border all the way down to southwestern France.
He has to have a system of government and of law that can function when he’s not there. By the late 14th century, when Richard and Henry — my two kings in this book — appear on the scene, the king has two key functions which appear on the two sides of his seal. On one side, he sits in state wearing a crown, carrying an orb and scepter as a lawgiver and a judge. That is a key function of what he does for his people. He imposes law. He gives justice. He maintains order.
On the other side of the seal, he’s wearing armor on a warhorse with a sword unsheathed in his hand. That’s his function as a defender of the realm in an intensely practical way. He has to be a soldier, a warrior to repel attacks or, indeed, to launch attacks if that’s the best form of defense. To do that, he needs money.
For that, the institution of parliament has developed, which offers consent to taxation that he can demonstrate is in the national interest. It has also come to be a law-making forum. Wherever he needs to make new laws, he can make statute law in Parliament that therefore, in its very nature, has the consent of the representatives of the realm.
COWEN: What is it, back then, that government cannot do?
CASTOR: What a government doesn’t have in the medieval period is, it doesn’t have a monopoly of force. In other words, it doesn’t have a police force. It doesn’t have a professional police force, and it doesn’t have a standing army, or at least by the late Middle Ages, England does have a permanent garrison in Calais, which is its outpost on the northern coast of France, but that’s not a garrison that can be recalled to England with any ease.
So, enforcement is the government’s key problem. To enforce the king’s edicts, it therefore relies on a hierarchy of private power on the landed, the great landowners of the kingdom, who are wealthy because of their possession of land, but crucially, also have control over people, the men who live and work on their land. If you need to get an enforcement posse — this is medieval English language that we use when we talk of sheriffs and posses — the county posse, the power of the county.
If you need to get men out quickly, you need to tap into those local power structures. You don’t have modern communications. You don’t have modern transport. The whole hierarchy of the king’s theoretical authority has to tap into and work through the private hierarchy of landed power.
COWEN: Why do those landed nobles obey the king? They’re afraid of the future raising of an army? Or they’re handed out some other benefit? What keeps the incentives all working together to the extent they stay working together?
CASTOR: They have a very important pragmatic interest in obeying the king because the king is the keystone of the hierarchy within which they are powerful and wealthy. Of course, they want more power and more wealth for themselves and for their dynasty, but importantly, they don’t want to risk everything to acquire more if it means serious danger that they might lose what they already have.
They have every interest in maintaining the hierarchy as it already is, within which they can then . . . It’s like having a referee…
A very good episode, definitely recommended. I enjoyed all of Helen’s books, most notably the recent
*Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America*
By Sam Tanenhaus. I held off reading this book at first, as I felt I already knew a lot about Buckley and his life. But it is excellent. Very well written and engaging throughout. I learned a good deal, and it is one of the best books on the history of the American 20th century right wing.
As a youth, watching Firing Line, I frequently was frustrated that Buckley was not more analytical, and that he sometimes spoke in such a roundabout manner. In part I wanted to expand Conversations with Tyler to fill that gap. I am also indebted to Buckley for first getting me interested in Bach. So he played a very definite role in my life.
*The Monastic World*
The author is Andrew Jotischky, and the subtitle is A 1,200-Year History. He writes very well and also can think in terms of organizations. Excerpt:
As such, monasteries were complex institutions. The demands of property ownership included systems for collection and receipt of rents, and thus methods of accountancy and management of finances and human resources. But even the fulfilment of their spiritual functions of communal worship required internal systems and management. The correct performance of the liturgy required training in chant and sacramental theology. It also required service books and specific sacred objects for celebration of the eucharist. In order to fulfil the expectation of constant prayer and praise, the liturgical offices were spread across day and night, which in turn meant that light — from candles or oil, depending on the region — was needed for several hours. All of these items had to be produced or procured. Monasteries thus needed supplies ranging from bread to wine to wax and parchment, and the technical know-how to process these. Moreover, the schools that monasteries developed to train their own monks also provided opportunities for a largely non-literate society to educate their young.
An excellent book, Yale University Press, and currently priced below $15 in hardcover.
What should I ask Anne Appelbaum?
Yes, I will be doing a Conversation with her. From Wikipedia:
Anne Elizabeth Applebaum…is an American journalist and historian. She has written about the history of Communism and the development of civil society in Central and Eastern Europe. She became a Polish citizen in 2013.
Applebaum has worked at The Economist and The Spectator magazines, and she was a member of the editorial board of The Washington Post (2002–2006). She won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2004 for Gulag: A History. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine, as well as a senior fellow of the Agora Institute and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University .
But she has done more yet, including work on a Polish cuisine cookbook. So what should I ask her?
What I’ve been reading
1. Michael Kempe, The Best of all Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days. A good book, I had not realized the full import of Leibniz in the history of binary computation, his understanding of “novels as models,” his theory of social distancing during epidemics, or just how much attention he devoted to the historical episode of a woman as Pope.
2. Judith Scheele, Shifting Sands: A Human History of the Sahara. A quite good, informative, and readable book on a very much undercovered topic. Saharan civilization is something that runs deeper, and is more coherent, than any set of national boundaries in the region. The author spent years living in the Saharan region of Chad. Recommended, a good example of “you should read a book about a topic you are not thinking of reading about.”
3. Frank Close, Destroyer of Worlds: The Deep History of the Nuclear Age 1895-1965. A good look at the underlying scientific history behind nuclear, most of all in the pre-Manhattan project years. I had not sufficiently realized how dangerous this research was, and how many of the people died prematurely from cancer, quite possibly from radiation exposure.
4. Bijan Omrani, God is an Englishman: Christianity and the Creation of England. Some might argue this book is a “duh,” nonetheless I found it a good overview of the importance of Christianity in British history, and suggesting that those ties should not be lost or abandoned,
5. Sam Dalrymple, Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. Are you excited by the prospect of learning more about why Burma split off from the rest of the Raj in 1937? If so, this is the book for you. It also has good coverage on the role of the Middle East in the history of the Raj.
6. Perry Anderson, Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War. This strikes me as the kind of book where a very established author is seeking to work out issues that preoccupied him as a much younger man. Such books tend to be interesting but also incomplete and unsatisfying? Overall I am glad I read this one.
7. Diana Darke, Islamesque: The Forgotten Craftsmen Who Built Europe’s Medieval Monuments. Perhaps overargued in places, but an excellent book, with super-clear explanations and wonderful illustrations. Excerpt: “No architectural style just ‘appears’ magically out of nowhere. All the key innovations attributed to Romanesque — new vaulting techniques, the use of decorative frames, interlace and ornamental devices like blind arcades, Lombard bands, blind arches, lesenes, Venetian dentil and the use of fantastical beasts and foliage in sculpture — can be traced back to their origins, and all of these without exception lead us eastwards [to Islam].”
The new Javier Cercas book
The new Cercas book is El loco de Dios en el fin del mundo. That title translates roughly as “The crazy man of God at the end of the world,” noting there are ambiguities in who that man is (Cercas? The Pope?), and whether the end of the world refers to a trip to Mongolia or the apocalypse or perhaps death.
Cercas, arguably Spain’s greatest living writer, decides to shed his purely secular perspective and accompany Pope Francis on his Mongolia visit, a country with about 1500 Catholics. Like many of Cercas’s novels, it is a mix of non-fiction and fiction, and it is also self-consciously a detective story – which truths will Cercas unlock during this journey? Most of all, he wants to know if his mother will meet her husband (Cercas’s father) when she dies.
We live in a time when an atheistic European author puts down his preoccupation with Spanish history and spends almost five hundred pages engaging with the Pope and also the possibility of God. A vibe shift if there ever was one.
Cercas reports that he came away from the trip more anti-clerical than before, but on the matter of God and the miracle of the Resurrection, I read his text as ever so ambiguous.
Do not despair, the works of Cercas usually end up translated into English in a reasonably prompt manner.
*Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future*
What should I ask Seamus Murphy?
Yes I will be doing a Conversation with him. An associate of his emails me this excellent description of his work:
Spent over two decades photographing in Afghanistan (12 trips between 1994–2007). Has been back since the fall of the U.S. side.
- Collaborated with P.J. Harvey on her album Let England Shake— they travelled together through Kosovo, Afghanistan, and the U.S. while she wrote songs and he filmed/photographed. This lead to P.J.’s album, and Seamus’s documentary ‘A Dog Called Money’
- Made a film on recently deceased Irish poet Pat Ingoldsby. Pat was a well known Dublin character, a former TV presenter who sold his poetry on the streets of Dublin outside Trinity college for decades.
- Published several books, including:
- A Darkness Visible: Afghanistan
- I Am the Beggar of the World (with Afghan women’s Landay poetry)
- The Hollow of the Hand (with P.J. Harvey)
- The Republic (on Ireland pre-2016 centenary)
- Won 7 work press photo awards, and has photos held in the Getty Museum and Imperial War Museum
- More recently Seamus has published Strange Love which is a photography book on visual parallels between the U.S. and Russia.
- Seamus also semi lives in India now and has photo collections on modernising/not-modernising India (https://www.seamusmurphy.com/Epic-City/2)
TC again: So what should I ask him?
p.s. Here is Murphy’s home page.
What I’ve been reading
1. Alex Niven, The North Will Rise Again: In Search of the Future in Northern Heartlands. If you can look past the usual ill-informed chatter about Maggie ruining northern England (the author needs to study growth models!), this is quite an interesting book. I do not mind that it roams into the territory of popular music in what seems to be an arbitrary fashion. Here is one bit: “I have written before about how a version of this cultural complex is one of the reasons why English identity — with its nostalgia for vague historical dreams and absurd lack of real constitutional structures in the present — is really a kind of vast melancholic illusion. Northern English identity is a sort of killer variant of this more widespread national disease.”
2. Christopher Clarey, The Warrior: Rafael Nadal and His Kingdom of Clay. An intelligent and very good book, covering one of the greatest eras (Federer-Nadal-Djokovic) that any sport ever has had.
3. Ned Palmer, A Cheesemonger’s Tour de France. About half of this book is good and focused. Think of it as one possible introduction to French regional history. You can learn why Provence is so special for goat cheese, and why Dijon has kept so many original agricultural and cheese-making traditions. Why cheese comes from Brittany only in recent times, and so on.
4. Rupert Gavin, Amorous or Loving?: The Highly Peculiar Tale of English and the English. An excellent book that will make my best of the year list. How did the English language come to be so diverse and also have so many words? Along the way you get decent insights into economic history, the importance of London, and the Straussian readings of Macbeth.
5. Tim Bouverie, Allies at War: The Politics of Defeating Hitler. A useful and detailed reminder that allies never really quite get along with each other. You can never read too many books about World War II.
I am very sympathetic with Dean Spears and Michael Geruso,
Are cultural products getting longer?
Ted Gioia argues that cultural products are getting longer:
Some video creators have already figured this out. That’s why the number of videos longer than 20 minutes uploaded on YouTube grew from 1.3 million to 8.5 million in just two years…
Songs are also getting longer. The top ten hits on Billboard actually increased twenty seconds in duration last year. Five top ten hits ran for more than five minutes…
I’ve charted the duration of [Taylor] Swift’s studio albums over the last two decades, and it tells the same story. She has gradually learned that her audience prefers longer musical experiences…
I calculated the average length of the current fiction bestsellers, and they are longer than in any of the previous measurement periods.
Movies are getting longer too. Of course this is the exact opposite of what the “smart phones are ruining our brains” theorists have been telling us. I think I would sooner say that the variance of our attention spans is going up? In any case, here is part of Ted’s theory:
- The dopamine boosts from endlessly scrolling short videos eventually produce anhedonia—the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure. (I write about that here.) So even addicts grow dissatisfied with their addiction.
- More and more people are now rebelling against these manipulative digital interfaces. A sizable portion of the population simply refuses to become addicts. This has always been true with booze and drugs, and it’s now true with digital entertainment.
- Short form clickbait gets digested easily, and spreads quickly. But this doesn’t generate longterm loyalty. Short form is like a meme—spreading easily and then disappearing. Whereas long immersive experiences reach deeper into the hearts and souls of the audience. This creates a much stronger bond than any 15-second video or melody will ever match.
An important piece and useful corrective.
What I’ve been reading
Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife. One of the best-written biographies I have read in years. I would not say it is close to my core interests, but if you think you might like it you will.
Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Never Known Men. I enjoyed this novel: “Deep Underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.”
J.P. Mallory, The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting Their Story. The best book I know of on the origins and unities of Indo-European languages. I had not known Edward Sapir was born in Pomerania. And “…the Keres people who occupy seven pueblos (villages) in New Mexico speak a language totally unrelated to any of their neighbours and their origins have been frequently disputed.”
Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn. One of the best Trollope novels it seems, even though it is not (yet?) clear what the plot actually consists of. Currency decimalization is also one of the side plots, who can argue with that?
Manu S. Pillai, Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity. It may be fruitless to argue about this topic on-line, but almost all Westerners under-read when the topic is Hinduism.
What should I ask Nate Silver?
Yes, I am doing another Conversation with him, in honor of the paperback edition of his highly engaging book On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything. Here is the last installment of a CWT with Nate, here was my first Conversation with Nate.
So what should I ask him?
Walton University?
Axios: Two grandsons of Walmart founder Sam Walton plan to launch a private university focused on science and tech, located on the company’s old HQ campus near downtown Bentonville, Arkansas.
…The future university plans to offer innovative, flexible pathways to jobs in automation, logistics, biotech and computing — fields crucial to Northwest Arkansas’ future.
Many colleges and universities were created in the 1960s and 1970s but the majority of elite R1s emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century, including notable private universities created from the entrepreneurial fortunes of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Stanford, Cornell, Hopkins and Rice among others.
We are perhaps now seeing a return to that creative period with Walton, Thomas Monaghan, Patrick Collison (Arc Institute) and most notably Joe Lonsdale at the University of Austin. Tech provides both the funds and the impetus to build something new and different. As Tyler and I argued, online education and AI will change education dramatically, perhaps returning us to a now-affordable Oxford style-tutorial system with the AIs as tutors.
The University of Austin, by the way, has excellent taste in economics textbooks.
The High Cost of Self-Sufficiency
Mike Riggs and his wife dreamed of returning to the land. It wasn’t as easy as it looks on Tik-Tok:
How many square feet of raised beds do you need to meet a toddler’s strawberry demand? I still don’t know. We dedicated 80 square feet to strawberries last season. The bugs ate half our harvest, and the other half equaled roughly what our kid could eat in a week.
Have you ever grown peas? Give them something to climb, and they’ll stretch to the heavens. Have you ever shelled peas? It is an almost criminal misuse of time. I set a timer on my phone last year. It took me 13 minutes to shell a single serving. Meanwhile, a two-pound bag of frozen peas from Walmart costs $2.42. And the peas come shelled.
…In addition to possums and deer, we’ve faced unrelenting assaults from across the eukaryotic kingdoms: the tomato hornworm caterpillar, the cabbage looper caterpillar, the squash vine borer, the aphid, the thrip, the earwig and the sowbug; cucurbit downy mildew, powdery mildew, collar rot, black rot, sooty mold, botrytis gray mold and stem canker; the nematode, the gray garden slug, the eastern gray squirrel, the eastern cottontail rabbit and the groundhog. All of these organisms reside in the North Carolina Piedmont and like to eat what we eat. Many of them work toward this existential goal while humans sleep, which is why the North Carolina State Agriculture Extension advises growers to inspect their plants at night. No, thank you.
…. In the early 1900s, one of my paternal great-grandfathers moved from urban Illinois to a homestead in Oklahoma. Our only picture of him was taken shortly before the Dust Bowl destroyed his farm. After his farm failed, he abandoned my great-grandmother and their children and migrated to California with thousands of other Okies. When my crops fail, I go to Whole Foods.
Some good lessons here in self-sufficiency, comparative advantage and the productivity of specialization and trade. Of course, it might have been easier for Mike had he read Modern Principles:
How long could you survive if you had to grow your own food? Probably not very long. Yet most of us can earn enough money in a single day spent doing something other than farming to buy more food than we could grow in a year. Why can we get so much more food through trade than through personal production? The reason is that specialization greatly increases productivity. Farmers, for example, have two immense advantages in producing food compared with economics professors or students: Because they specialize, they know more about farming than other people, and because they sell large quantities, they can afford to buy large-scale farming machines. What is true for farming is true for just about every field of production—specialization increases productivity. Without specialization and trade, we would each have to produce our own food as well as other goods, and the result would be mass starvation and the collapse of civilization.
Oh, and by the way, don’t forget Adam Smith, “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”
French fact of the day
De Gaulle was the target of about thirty serious assassination attempts, two of which — in September 1961 and August 1962 — nearly succeeded. For some anti-Gaullists, the fixation on de Gaulle became so incorporated into their personality that their original reasons for wanting to kill him were eclipsed by the hatred he inspired.
Hating de Gaulle for accepting Algerian independence was one of those motives for at least one of those attempts.
That bit is from Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle, a good book.