7 Comments

• Matthew Huntbach 4th Dec '08 - 3:15pm

  My tip is don’t read over Christmas.

  Churn out press releases and letters to the editor. The press still has to print newspapers, but they’re very short of material at this time of the year. Now’s the time to make the front pagewith a press release that might make a column inch at a busier time.

• Jennie 6th Dec '08 - 1:19am

  I’m interested that the list you link to is exactly gender balanced, and also has representatives from BME communities and non-het folks; but yours seems to be skewed heavily towards the het, the white, and the male. I suspect that this is entirely unconscious on your part, and the list does seem to be a bit “quota-y”, but still…

  Also interesting that Vince and Graham get links, but Ros and Nick don’t.

  (when I say it’s interesting, I genuinely mean interesting, not anything more violent, btw. It’s hard to put across this sort of comment on the internet without sounding like you’re baying for blood, and I’m not, honestly).

• Sesenco 6th Dec '08 - 1:39am

  I would recommend “Nicholas Van Hoogstraten – Millionaire Killer” by Mike Walsh and Don Jordan.

  A thoroughly entertaining read, and an object lesson in how to be a selfish, arrogant pig and pull it off in style.

• Dave B 6th Dec '08 - 4:58am

  A recently read, and enjoyed, The Plan: 12 months to renew Britain by Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan.

  I think I may buy one of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther books for my Christmas present to myself. Or perhaps The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare and the Triumph of Anglo-America.

• Mark Pack 6th Dec '08 - 10:09am

  Jennie: the linking of names is done by a plugin, and it does a maximum of one link per person per page, so names sometimes aren’t liked if they appear in another story too.

  As for choice of names, there didn’t seem a lot of point in exactly repeating the full list so I went for the main party posts (leader, deputy leader, President and leader of MEPs – so not all a ‘Westminster’ list). Hence it reflects the make-up of senior party roles. The longer a list of names of party people there is, the more diverse it is generally is as you move away from, say, leader (always a man so far) to include others (e.g. Shadow Cabinet far from all male).

• Jennie 6th Dec '08 - 12:15pm

  Mark: thanks for the info about the links. I didn’t think I could see a rational reason for the way they had fallen.

  Interesting rationalisation you give there for the choice of names too. If you HAD have chosen the people you say you chose, the list would in fact have been ALL male. But there would have been a concomitant reduction in the het bias 😉

  FWIW, and since and I can see “well how would you have done it, then?” looming on your keyboard, I would said at the beginning “books chosen by people including the leader, president, etc.” and then chosen the three or four who had picked the most interesting books to quote (which may or may not have been a more gender/race/sexuality balanced selection).

  As for what I will be reading over Christmas? I have no idea. There will be at least two trips to the library between now and then, and I will probably get some books for Christmas and birthday also.

• Terry Gilbert 9th Dec '08 - 11:01pm

  Reading Skidelsky’s ‘Keynes’ – which will last me to Christmas and beyond, and is highly relavant to the current economic situation and a good antidote to some of the right wing loonies who have recently appeared in the Lib Dems.