Stephan Chambers, Marshall Institute Director
Marion Foucarde and Kieran Healy’s The Ordinal Society changed the way I think about search, ranking, measurement, and society. I hesitate to say it’s the best book I read this year (ordinal thinking) but I don’t hesitate to recommend it. Every year I read at least one book by an LSE colleague: this year it was Conor Gearty’s Homeland Insecurity which is a terrifyingly well-informed study of the rise (and rise) of anti-terrorism law. For sheer escapist, read-in-one-sitting-especially-if-you-walked-the-coast to coast I strongly recommend David Nicholls’s You are Here. The best visual experience of the year was Frank Auerbach’s charcoal heads at the Courtauld. And my surprise TV discovery was ‘Flack’.
Julian le Grand, Professor of Social Policy
The most stimulating book I have read recently is by this year’s Nobel Prize-winning economist, Daren Acemoglu, and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail. Immediately accessible, indeed something of a page turner, it is peppered with riveting accounts of the rise and fall of countries from all over the world. At the end, it is hard to disagree with the book’s central thesis – that nations only succeed if they have inclusive political and economic institutions – which raises the question of how politically and economically inclusive certain countries currently are in this year of shock elections and ongoing wars. I also enjoyed the even broader historical perspective provided by David Wengrow and our late LSE colleague, David Graeber, in their modestly titled work The Dawn of Everything – A New History of Humanity. No central thesis here – indeed, the authors see it as their job to be as iconoclastic as possible, destroying one grand historical theory after another, but always in an entertaining yet scholarly fashion.
Jonathan Roberts, Teaching Director and Professor (Education) in Civil Society and Public Policy
Guido Alfani’s “As Gods Among Men: a History of the Rich in the West” (2023; Princeton University Press) is a remarkable overview of the wealthy in western societies. Founded upon a detailed investigation of historical patterns of wealth, it explores how wealth is acquired (typically inheritance, finance, or innovation / technology) and how the wealthy interact with, and are regarded by, broader society. Along the way we learn about the rise of the Medicis, about possible declines in the wealthy’s charitable giving after the Reformation, and about Phillip II of Spain’s tendency not to pay back his loans. Alfani concludes with concern at the current concentration of economic wealth in modern societies. I also caught up this year with 2021 miniseries Dopesick (BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Hulu), based on the opioid crisis in the US. It’s a drama, and uses fictional or composite characters to make a very particular argument. Nonetheless it’s a coruscating critique of regulatory weakness and profit-extraction placed before social purpose; there’s also a warning about the danger of unfettered entrepreneurship in fields that are essential to human wellbeing.
Kerryn Krige, Senior Lecturer in Practice
I start my Christmas reading list with two recommendations from students – so my sincere thanks to them. Whistling Vivaldi is a thoughtful read on stereotypes and identity, and the invisible pressures that catalyse – or suppress – performance, based on our race, class, gender, religion, geography – this list is infinite. By making these invisible systems, visible, Whistling Vivaldi builds a narrative that encourages us to acknowledge our judgements and talk to, and with, each other. The Moleskin Foundation publishes Folios, a beautiful book series that brings together the writings of artists and activists from their Creative Pioneers programme. The 6th Folio is curated around a 1963 quote from a eulogy delivered by JFK for Robert Frost: “…for art establishes the basic human truths that must serve as the touchstones of our judgement”. I have also enjoyed browsing the LSEs digital library which houses the Charles Booth notebooks. Written in the late 1890’s these notebooks form part of a 17-year research project, on poverty, religion and labour in London’s east end. They capture the harsh reality of Victorian London at the height of empire. I recommend starting with either the map, which helpfully connects you to notebooks referencing your points of interest, or the Stepney notebooks. In a simple shorthand, the entries summarise the lives of people admitted to the workhouse. Lastly, a musical! You can’t go wrong with Back to the Future, just down the road from LSE at the Adelphi. A toe-tapping score and the Delorean really does fly.
Carl Moldestad, 100x Programme Manager
I’m reading book 1 of ‘My struggle’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard – an autobiographical novel depicting family dynamics and social life through the lens of Knausgaard’s experiences coming of age in Norway and the imprints of a troubled relationship with his father. In terms of TV shows, I really liked ‘Shogun’ and thought that ‘A Man on the Inside’ was a funny and light-hearted watch. Lastly, I always enjoy listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast ‘Revisionist History’. The latest season contains a 9-part series titled ‘Hitler’s Olympics’ which investigates Hitler’s endeavour to stage the most extravagant and spectacular summer Olympics ever, the 1936 Berlin Games. It’s a brilliant collection of insights from ‘the games behind the Games’, the most consequential Olympics in history.
Alex Wright, Programme Delivery Manager
This year I’ve been caught up in a different kind of storytelling, that of how human stories can be told through data. My entry into this was via Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England? Though occasionally dry, in sheer volume of information as well as wit, the book condenses an extraordinary amount of work to try and answer the question of the title. A task which turns out to be far more difficult than one might initially think. The book is a gateway to a far larger work in the form of whoownsengland.org, an ongoing project between Shrubsole and Data Analyst and LSE Visiting Senior Fellow, Anna Powell-Smith, to wrangle the information into a map to help tell the stories of how history, politics, war and economics have shaped land ownership in England over the last 1000 years or so. Additionally, given the extraordinary year of elections we find ourselves in, Prof. Sir Julian Le Grand and I ran a session during our last teaching module using the 2024 Global Elections Super-Cycle map produced by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) to capture just some of the statistics from 74 elections and an estimated 2 billion people expected go to the polls. We were ably assisted by our international cohort of Executive MSc Social Business and Entrepreneurship students who could in turn tell us the human stories behind the numbers.
Georgia Kewley, 100x Head of Programme
I loved Assembly by Natasha Brown and Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan – both only ~100 pages but powerful and perfectly formed. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray was many (many!) more pages, hilarious and sad, and totally absorbing. I also couldn’t put down Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, about friendship, love and the early heydays of video games.
Jack Winterton, Marshall Institute Research Officer
What makes a good wine snob? How can they tell what a good wine is? Who gets to decide anyway? All these questions and more are answered in a fascinating paper I recently read on the construction of quality in German wine markets. You might want to take a quick look at this article before you have to endure (or subject) your loved ones to some traditional festive snootiness about wine selection. This article “Quality Classifications in Competition: Price Formation in the German Wine Market” argues that what makes a wine “good” is often more about subjective factors and social processes than objective quality. The story behind the wine, the opinions of important critics and the prestige of the vineyard significantly sway the price of wine. The article cites one experiment with enology students in Bourdeaux who were unable to distinguish white from red wine just from the taste. So perhaps we take the labels off the wine bottles this year and see if the wine still tastes good?
Kate Hyland, Marshall Institute Administrator
Sticking with the theme of this ‘Year of Elections’, Why India Votes, by LSE anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee is a fascinating account of why the most disadvantaged Indians are the most likely to vote; a trend which is the opposite direction to all other democracies. It is an accessible read with colourful vignettes drawn from ethnographic research carried out in 11 of India’s states. I have also listened to some fantastic podcasts this year. Field Trip by the Washington Post is a sensorial account of some of the United States’ national parks which situates these parks in their historical and local contexts. The Witness In His Own Words is a moving but troubling auto-biographical account of Joseph O’Callaghan’s life before and after he became the youngest person to enter Ireland’s Witness Protection Programme. Finally, Things Fell Apart, offers an interrogation of the origins of some of the most divisive culture war issues. Embarking, always, from a position of empathy, Jon Ronson encourages the listener to understand ‘the other side’.