You can listen here. Very thoughtful questions from Louise, who is an excellent interviewer.
The Divine Economy on Forbes’ Best Business Books of 2024 list
The list is here. And the other titles look really interesting…
Browsing Tags book
The Divine Economy long listed for FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year 2024
I’m happy to hear that The Divine Economy made the longlist, together with 15 other excellent titles out of 600 submitted. It did not make the shortlist, which was announced on September 17th.
The Divine Economy – presse française
Voici quelques articles parus sur The Divine Economy dans la presse française:
1) Par Jean Duchesne dans Aleteia – “En quoi la foi n’est pas étrangère aux réalités économiques”. Moins une critique du livre qu’un survol d’approches à la place des sciences économiques dans l’étude de la religion. Article ici.
2) Entretien avec Thomas Mahler dans l’Express: “Au niveau mondial, le christianisme n’est pas en déclin face à l’islam”. Article ici.
3) Par Bertrand Jacquillat dans l’Opinion – “Plateformes numériques et religions: rivalités et concurrence”:
“Il peut paraître iconoclaste de soumettre l’espace religieux à l’analyse économique. Les religions pourtant s’y prêtent, du fait qu’elles partagent certaines des caractéristiques des organisations séculaires, et bénéficient d’une puissance financière indéniable”.
4) Une critique anonyme courte mais favorable dans books.fr: “Les religions comme marques”.
PUBLISHED IN MAY 2024: The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People
Forthcoming book events:
AALIMS conference in Princeton, 11th April 2025.
The book was published by Princeton University Press on 14th May 2024. It was long listed for the FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year Award 2024, and was a finalist in the 2025 PROSE awards of the Association of American Publishers.
Here is a contribution to PUP’s Ideas page to mark the release: “A sermon from a mountebank? Religious messaging in the age of AI“.
Here is an extract in Foreign Policy: “The Divine Marketplace is Pretty Crowded”.
Launch events were held at the University of Glasgow on 28th May and at the London School of Economics on 29th May. The lecture at the LSE was recorded, and is available on YouTube here.
I discussed the book on 11th June during the launch event for the Starling 2024 Compendium, with Harvard Business School’s Amy Edmondson.
I gave a talk in a panel at the Society for Scientific Study of Religion, Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, 18th October 2024, with the excellent David Hollinger.
I gave the Score Strand III Lecture at the University of Cambridge on 17th November 2024, and have given book talks at the University of California at Berkeley, Chapman University and the University of Texas at Austin.
I published a piece on 30th August in IAI News entitled “How Religion Wrote the Playbook for Big Tech: Studying Religion from the Outside In“.
Reviews, podcasts and interviews are available here.
The announcement page is here, and you can order it there are well.
You can also order it on Amazon here.
The data files for the Statistical Appendix are available here.
Reviews, Interviews, Podcasts about The Divine Economy
If you want to propose a review, or alert me to one that has appeared and that is not mentioned on this page, you can contact me here.
Books of the year (or books of the season) lists:
FT/Schroders Business Book of the Year Longlist.
Forbes’ 10 Best Business Books of 2024.
London Business School Best Books of 2024.
Martin Wolf’s Summer Reading for 2024.
PROSE awards 2025 of the Association of American Publishers.
Reviews and interviews:
In English:
1) By Sascha Becker, review in the Journal of Economic Literature:
“[A]n insightful and enjoyable read. [Seabright’s] platform view makes for a fresh look at religious organizations. I suspect that all scholars of religion economics will find the book equally insightful. For those less familiar with the economics of religion, the book is also an easy-to-read launchpad to the field. . . it will enthuse broad-minded social scientists as well. Finally, since the book addresses ‘big questions’ in an accessible and engaging style, it will also be of interest to nonspecialists.”
2) In The Economist – “God™: an ageing product outperforms expectations”:
“The Divine Economy looks at how religions attract followers, money and power and argues that they are businesses—and should be analysed as such.
Professor Seabright calls religions “platforms”, businesses that “facilitate relationships”. (Other economists refer to religions as “clubs” or “glue”.) He then takes a quick canter through the history, sociology and economics of religions to illustrate this. The best parts of this book deal with economics, which the general reader will find enlightening.”
3) By Jane Shaw, in The Financial Times – “Is religion just like business?”:
“A wide-ranging book, full of fascinating examples from the world’s many religions…Using his economist’s tools to analyse the lasting power of the world’s religions, Seabright has produced an engaging and insightful book, which I found myself pondering long after I had read the last page. Religion is a powerful force in many parts of the world. The religions that continue to be successful in a rapidly changing environment, he concludes, keep evolving to remain so.”
4) By Martin Wolf, in The Financial Times‘ Best summer books of 2024: Economics:
“Seabright has a great talent for addressing original questions. In this book, he reverses the familiar trope that religion is the antithesis of mere economics. On the contrary, he argues, religions are competing businesses: they attract people by providing services they value, from the mundane — a community in which to find a compatible mate — to the sublime — a sense of life’s meaning. Since these wants will not disappear, neither will religions. But, he concludes rather encouragingly, religions will fail if they choose to shackle themselves to tyrants. One hopes he is right.” See an associated DALLE image here.
5) By Shadi Hamid in Foreign Affairs: “Secular stagnation: How Religion Endures in a Godless Age”.
“The Divine Economy is an ambitious work that attempts to think economically about something that so often seems beyond the grasp of the social sciences….As Seabright puts it, “Without economic resources behind them, the most beautifully crafted messages will struggle to gain a hearing in the cacophony of life.” It is rare and even refreshing to have a book about the rise of religion that concludes, in a sense, that it’s the economy, stupid…..If there were a world in which people cared only about calculating their economic self-interest, the power of religion would be significantly blunted. But the world does not quite work that way—and, if Seabright’s analysis is any indication, it won’t any time soon.”
6) With Stephen Scott in the Starling Compendium, pp. 409-414: “An Interview with Paul Seabright”, covers both The Divine Economy and The Company of Strangers.
7) By Jonathan Benthall in The Times Literary Supplement: “The free market in faith: viewing religion through the lens of economics”.
“Combining tough-mindedness and cultural sensitivity, Paul Seabright may help to bring religion nearer to the mainstream of international political debate.”
8) By Arnold Kling in EconLib: “The Religion Business”.
There is a “tension between the narrow definition of religion and Seabright’s broader platform perspective. If religion were merely the belief in certain animal spirits, then at least in the United States we would be happy to rely on the First Amendment and a tolerant attitude of, “sure, whatever floats your boat.” But as platforms, religions have an impact on the economy, on politics, and on social relations in general. Friction would seem to be inevitable, and it becomes unclear how best to apply the First Amendment.”
9) By Atul K. Shah in The LSE Review of Books blog:
“The Divine Economy draws from the insights of sociology, anthropology, psychology, political economy and philosophy to show the deep the effect of faith in everyday life and explains why religiosity has been dynamic rather than static, and creative in response to the challenges of modernity. It shows how the prediction that secularism would prevail in an age of science and reason has been proved wrong, precisely because religion provides people with meaning, purpose and community, which secularism alone often fails to deliver. For me, religion’s scope and challenge has been truly ambitious, and the book has risen to this through a structured organisation, beautiful narratives and accessible language, authoritative open-minded research, all compiled from decades of study of the economics of religion.”
10) By an anonymous reviewer in The Interim:
“Paul Seabright, an economist at the Toulouse School of Economics, ambitiously applies not only economics but anthropology, history, philosophy, political science, psychology, science, and sociology, to understand how the world’s religions…attract and retain followers and thus money and power to sustain themselves over time. Furthermore, Seabright does so looking beyond the Abrahamic religions and all in 341 pages before landing at the statistical appendix, endnotes, bibliography, and index….Seabright is on to something when he says that secularism has not succeeded because religion provides people with meaning, purpose, and community that is not available elsewhere; even in our increasingly secular cultures, billions of people still claim (if not always practice) their faith, and examining why through an interdisciplinary lens and economic reasoning helps explain why.”
11) By Mark Koyama, on his substack:
“The Divine Economy is an original and important contribution to the economics of religion. It is accessible and readable but there is also much for specialists and scholars to discuss and debate.”
12) By Helen Nicholls for the National Secular Society: “Paul Seabright’s economic perspective on religion provides useful insights into the power of religious institutions – and how religious privilege can be countered”:
“Religious privilege exists when religious beliefs and interests are treated as more important than secular ones. Discussion of religion often rests on the presumption that it is inherently special. Paul Seabright’s new book, The Divine Economy: How religions compete for wealth, power and people, offers a different approach to religion by viewing it through an economic lens…..The Divine Economy is refreshing in that it is neither pro nor anti religion. Seabright recognises that from an economic perspective, religions operate in a similar manner to other organisations and are as susceptible to corruption and abuse as other institutions. His answer is religious organisations should be just as accountable. He is clear that the relationship between religion and the state will always present challenges that we must be prepared to face head on for the benefit of religious and non-religious people alike.”
13) By Nick Spencer in The Church Times:
“The Divine Economy is an intelligent, wide-ranging, and well-researched book offering a helpful economic lens through which to interpret religion. “
14) By an anonymous reviewer in The Times of India: “Why Religion is Big Business“:
“Paul Seabright’s The Divine Economy explores how religions function like global businesses, competing for resources and adherents. The book examines how religious authority is gained and used, and the role of persuasion versus coercion. It highlights the corporatisation of religions and its implications, emphasising the religious platforms thrive better through persuasion rather than force.”
15) By David Voas in Ethnic and Racial Studies:
“The Divine Economy is a big book, both literally and figuratively. The text alone runs to about 130,000 words, followed by 88 pages of small-font endnotes and references. The title hints at the scale of the ambition: the book amounts to a sole-authored handbook of the scientific study of religion, starting with the question ‘What is religion?’ (Ch. 1) and continuing from there….Seabright has clearly read a tremendous amount, and the scope of the work is imposing. I doubt that anyone is fully competent to assess the whole book: I confess to having little expertise on many of the issues he covers. His writing is always interesting and often persuasive, but as I find the work superficial or mistaken on the topics I know about, my confidence is reduced in his conclusions more generally.”
16) By Miguel Petrosky in The Revealer: “Winning the Religious Marketplace“:
“Seabright’s canvas of the global religious landscape is painted with subtlety; the breadth of his book is global and draws from various episodes of world history and economic thought, yet his arguments offer insights on America’s political and religious climate at this moment.”
17) By Jonathan Rée, in The New Humanist: “The business of faith“.
“Not long ago, religion seemed to be in terminal decline. But, as Paul Seabright points out in his impressive new book, it is now going from strength to strength…Seabright has done something very unusual in The Divine Economy: he has found something new to say about religion”.
18) By Lewis F. Dunlap in Business Mirror (Philippines): “The creative destruction in religion“:
“Popularized by Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,” creative destruction is the natural tendency in capitalism to innovate as new, better ways replace outdated ways….Creative destruction applies to religion, too. Paul Seabright, in his 2024 book “Divine Economy,” narrates the disruption in Christianity brought about by the discovery of cheaper printing in the mid-fifteenth century. Before that, the lay faithful depended on the monks who translated scriptures written in Latin. When printing became cheaper, it became possible for the lay faithful in general to privately own copies of the Bible, especially in languages that they could understand. The new, more convenient way of experiencing the scripture creatively destroyed the outdated way.”
19) By Celine Nguyen on her substack personal canon:
“The Divine Economy is honestly staggering in scope; I couldn’t do it justice in my brief Goodreads review, and I’m really just scratching the surface here! But I loved reading this book, and it’s excellent for people who love big, comprehensive, Theory of Everything reads. It’s also a book that respects rigor and respects its readers: whenever Seabright incorporates quantitative or qualitative research, he’s careful to note things like the strengths/weakness of different types of data; or competing theories of certain phenomena, and why Seabright favors one over the others.”
20) By John Lampard on the blog Theology Everywhere: “The Church Through Different Eyes”:
“There are not many books which get a review in both The Church Times and The Financial Times, but The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power and People by Paul Seabright (Princeton University Press, 2024) achieved this unusual honour…..Perhaps the most penetrating insight of the book, at least to me, is that it looks on church organisations as ‘platforms’ rather than as organisations…It occurred to me, as I read Seabright, that Mr Wesley was ahead of his time in creating a connexional ‘platform’ which was more about relationships, with travelling preachers and class leaders, rather than an organisation. A platform facilitates relationships into which people can opt in or out as they wish or as they feel the need.”
In French:
1) By Jean Duchesne in Aleteia – “En quoi la foi n’est pas étrangère aux réalités économiques”. Not so much a review as a short overview of different approaches to the use of economics to study religion.
2) With Thomas Mahler in l’Express: “Au niveau mondial, le christianisme n’est pas en déclin face à l’islam”.
3) By Bertrand Jacquillat in l’Opinion: “Plateformes numériques et religions: rivalités et concurrence”:
“Il peut paraître iconoclaste de soumettre l’espace religieux à l’analyse économique. Les religions pourtant s’y prêtent, du fait qu’elles partagent certaines des caractéristiques des organisations séculaires, et bénéficient d’une puissance financière indéniable”.
4) A short but favourable review by an anonymous reviewer in books.fr: “Les religions comme marques”.
5) By Julien Damon in Les Echos: “Les religions, des firmes comme les autres“:
“Dans le prolongement d’un Adam Smith, qui s’intéressait à la compétition des religions et à leurs relations avec l’univers politique, et à partir d’un vaste ensemble de travaux académiques, il publie un livre passionnant…Seabright réussit l’exploit, sur un sujet aussi dense, de produire un panorama, en bien des points, captivant…Cet ouvrage original et percutant, d’économie mais aussi de sociologie, mérite d’être traduit.”
This has also been republished in Telos.eu
In German:
1) By Rainer Hank in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “Warum Religionen nicht totzukriegen sind”:
“Zwischen 1850 und 1950 erlebte der deutsche Katholizismus eine seiner größten Blüten in der Kirchengeschichte. Zufall? Nein, so lese ich es in einem faszinierenden Buch des britischen Ökonomen Paul Seabright, der an der Universität Toulouse lehrt. „The Divine Economy“ heißt das Buch. Die These: Religionen sind nicht totzukriegen. Der Forscher schreibt sine ira et studio; er argumentiert weder als Religionskritiker noch als Anwalt der Kirchen, sondern strikt als Wirtschaftswissenschaftler…..Da geht es den hiesigen Kirchen nicht anders als dem von Uber attackierten Taxigewerbe. Mehr und nicht weniger Wettbewerb, eine radikale Trennung vom Staatskirchenrecht, wäre die Empfehlung des Ökonomen für die Rückgewinnung von kirchlicher Innovation. Wer glaubt, dass es so kommt, wird selig.”
In Dutch:
1) By Aad Kamsteeg in Nederlands Daglblad: “De economie van het goddelijke: religie is naast een persoonlijk geloof ook vaak een kosten-batenanalyse“:
“Wat maakt religie zo krachtig in de levens van mensen? Is het de belofte van het eeuwige leven, of zit er óók economie in religie? De gelauwerde Britse econoom Paul Seabright bekijkt religie als een sociaal en economisch systeem dat mensen samenbrengt door de baten die het biedt.”
Other references in the print media:
1) Editorial in The Times of India: “Why Religion is Big Business: an economic lens might explain its fortunes”. Not so much a review as an editorial opinion piece that summarises (approvingly) the book’s main arguments:
“God’s work is worldly work, and religions are businesses like any other, argues The Divine Economy…”. Full editorial here.
2) By Andrew Brown in The Church Times – “Using economics to explain religion has limits”. So, apparently, does reviewing a review of the book instead of reviewing the book itself, since Brown apparently believes the author is one Paul Seagate…. My letter to the Church Times correcting the spelling is here.
3) By John L Allen Jr in The Catholic Herald: “Africa calling: Westerners must accept that Catholicism’s centre of gravity is shifting.” The article begins:
“British academic Paul Seabright recently published an intriguing new book called The Divine Economy, which attempts to offer an economic analysis of religion. For admirers of belief, it includes the consoling premise that “religion is not in decline; it is, in many ways, more powerful than it has ever been”.
To prove the point, Seabright wanted to open with a vignette to capture the enduring appeal of religious faith. It was natural, arguably even inevitable, that he chose a setting in Africa – specifically, a Pentecostal megachurch in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, where his heroine, Grace, devotes a considerable portion of her meagre income to supporting the lavish lifestyle of Pastor William.”
Podcasts and radio interviews:
With Rory Cellan-Jones and Iza Hussin on Crossing Channels, the IAST podcast.
With Mike Fallat on Million Dollar Stories.
With Alison Kuhlow and Roger Goldman on Mountain Money on National Public Radio.
With Chris Voss on The Chris Voss Show.
With Matthew Wilkin on The Sociology Show Podcast (video link to the episode here).
With Vivek Shankar on The Interesting Podcast.
With Louise Perry on her podcast Maiden Mother Matriarch (link here).
With Michael Shermer.
With Abhishek Ashok Kumar on The Point Blank Show.
With Richard Aedy on The Money (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).
With Julian Lorkin for the Cambridge Economics Faculty Alumni podcast.
With Morteza Hajizadeh on New Books Network.
Short book reviews (non-fiction)
Here some very short (one-paragraph) unpublished reviews of works of non-fiction I have enjoyed and would recommend for at least some readers. In the reverse order in which I read them, not of publication, so most recent reads first:
April 2025:
A History of the Muslim World: From Its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity, by Michael Cook:
I don’t intend to review here many books that are directly related to my research, but I will make exceptions for those that will fascinate general readers. This remarkable and panoramic book not only does exactly what its title proclaims, but also provides many general insights along the way. Like the fact that “most of Arabia was too poor in agricultural resources to provide adequate returns to would-be state builders” (p.9), a predicament of almost all the Muslim world (with the exceptions of the Nile delta, and of Mesopotamia until the environmental crisis of the late 9th century). This meant that Islamic rulers were much more at the mercy of both external raiders and internal rivals compared to their Christian counterparts who had much more arable land available to tax. Or the fact that, for related reasons, in both Anatolia and the Balkans, one of the main drivers of conversion to Islam was the fact that the Quran forbids enslavement of Muslims, and the main threat of violence came from Muslim raiders. Though Muslims often found pretexts for enslaving other Muslims, the prohibition often worked – though usually at the expense of non-Muslim populations a little further way, like the sub-Saharan Africans who became victims of “the drying up of the supply of slaves from the Berber population of North Africa owing to the spread of Islam” (p. 660).
Grandparenting: On Love and Relationships Across Generations, by Terri Apter:
As a new grandparent I loved this book (disclosure: the author is a personal friend). Not only was it a pleasure to read but I also learned a great deal from it. The blend of case study and relevant science works extremely well. In particular it’s good to be reminded of the sheer variety of ways in which grandparents interact with their grandchildren and the parents of their grandchildren. The fact that there’s “no job description” for being a grandparent, as she puts it, is a source of strength even if sometimes of confusion. A rôle under continual reinvention.
March 2025:
The Evolution of Religions: A History of Related Traditions, by Lance Grande:
A massive and fascinating account of the world’s religious traditions, organised along phylogenetic lines – that is, through the creation of “family trees” of religious movements. The analogy to phylogenetic trees in biology is often illuminating, when it helps us to understand religious movements through comparison with those from which they diverged. Sometimes it is misleading: although there’s a fact of the matter about whether crocodiles are more closely related to birds than to lizards (surprisingly, they are), there’s no fact of the matter about whether Vodou is more closely related to African polytheism than to Roman Catholicism (it’s clearly influenced by both). The book also focuses on a movement’s doctrines to the exclusion of its social, political and economic organisation – but I still learned an enormous amount from it, and wish I’d known about it before writing The Divine Economy.
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, by Agnes Callard:
Much more of a philosopher’s book than Susana Monsó’s (below), and not in a good way since it contains more stilted professional writing, including phrases about “knowing that p” and so forth (why can’t philosophers come up with more elegant motivating examples?). But it more than compensates for this by its beguiling portrait of Socrates as neither gadfly nor midwife but somehow both, as a person we must all feel sad not to have known. Why has his example been so hard to emulate?
February 2025:
Jane Austen: A Life, by Claire Tomalin:
This is a conventionally structured but very finely written literary biography. By that I mean that you do not learn much about the economy or society of Jane Austen’s time, nor even much about her inner life, concerning which Tomalin declines to speculate beyond the few traces that have been left to us. But it paints an evocative picture of what it might have been like to know her. I was evidently unfair to Jane Austen in implying (point 10 here) that she was uninterested in the lives of children or servants. She was apparently kind and attentive to both, even if she didn’t think they were interesting enough to feature in her novels except as minor scenery. Despite Tomalin’s elegant portrayal, it remains mysterious to me how she was able to break free of the stifling conventions of her social milieu and bring her startling talent to the attention of the entire world.
December 2024:
Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death, by Susana Monsó:
It’s extraordinarily hard to do contemporary philosophy while also teaching your readers many empirical facts they didn’t know about the world, but Susana Monsó pulls off this feat magnificently in this mixture of natural history and conceptual analysis. There’s exactly as much conceptual analysis as is needed to understand the impressive array of accounts of animals reacting to death – their own and others’ – plus a real feast of animal observation that is never cute but always to the point. The only other philosopher I can think of who comes anywhere near this is Peter Godfrey Smith whose book Metazoa made me realise how much the world can teach us about animal consciousness. A tour de force.
August 2024:
The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland:
This excellently written and narrated book is several things at once: a compelling true adventure story, a harrowing account of one of the greatest atrocities in history, and an intriguing meditation on the historical processes that shaped the reception of the news of the death camps as these began to emerge in Europe from 1942 onwards, as well as an attempt to answer the question “what difference would it have made if more people had known this earlier?”
July 2024:
Jews, Judaism and Success, by Robert Eisen:
I have a longer review which has appeared in Contemporary Jewry and which begins “Robert Eisen has published an excellent book setting out a clear, cogent and highly original answer to the question why Jews have ‘become such a remarkably successful minority in the modern Western world'”.
Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, by Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips:
A collaborative project between a great literary critic and a renowned champion of psychoanalysis exploring how the chance to reset your life after initial setbacks features as a recurrent theme in the works of these two towering cultural figures. Is it just me, or is it something intrinsic to the two subjects, or is it just an accidental feature of these two writers’ respective prose styles? I find the chapters on Shakespeare luminous and inspiring, but I often struggle to make it through the meandering sentences of the chapters on Freud and emerge into sunlight on the other side.
May 2024:
Right Kind of Wrong: Why Learning to Fail Can teach Us to Thrive, by Amy Edmondson:
A zinger of a book in the inspirational business genre, replete with anecdotes about the way in which rebounding from failure can lead to both personal wisdom and professional success. Distinguishes different types of failure (simple, complex and intelligent) and different attitudes to them, and links this to the notion of psychological safety in organisations which Edmondson has pioneered over many years. You get the point of the argument quite early in the book, so the subsequent anecdotes illustrate rather than develop the theme.
Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative, by Glenn Loury:
Fascinating, and not just because I know, like and admire the author. An absorbing account of what it is to have a heart stronger than your head, and a head smarter than your heart. It strikes me as having many wise things to say about racism in America, but then, what would I know? Makes me reflect hard about whether we can escape the prism of identity: we can and we can’t, Loury seems to be saying. Economists are not known for their emotional candour, but Loury dispatches this cliché with sometimes brutal vigour.
April 2024:
Geography is Destiny: Britain and the World, a 10,000 year history, by Ian Morris:
A jaunty gallop through the history of the British Isles, with the running theme that the English Channel is eternal but its role as a barrier or a bridge is not. Technology (especially boats, ships, planes and missiles) and institutions, on both sides of the Channel, have determined whether the inhabitants on the norther side of the water have preferred to stand aloof from those on the south, or have seen their destiny as inseparable. The answer keeps changing; Brexit was just another variation on a theme that has been playing for millennia. Lively, often tendentious, always fun.
March 2024:
Christianity’s American Fate, by David Hollinger:
A clear and concise overview of Hollinger’s research on the way in which the US has come to have “an increasingly secular society…saddled with an increasingly religious politics”. Discusses how ecumenical Protestantism took a leading role in progressive politics from the interwar period onward. In the process it paved the way for some progressive ecumenicals to leave religion altogether, and for some conservative ecumenicals to join the evangelical movement, which in turn became more politically engaged on the right. Especially good on the role of missionary service in shaping ecumenicals’ commitment to anti-racism and anti-colonialism, and on the immigration of Jews to America in overcoming the Protestant monopoly on American cultural life.
Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart:
A revealing and well written account of Rory Stewart’s career as a Conservative MP and minister. Depressingly candid about the dysfunction and cynicism of British political life and the utter unsuitability of the House of Commons for promoting effective government. Sometimes unintentionally funny, as when he writes (p. 274) that, during a conversation with a prison governor, “I stopped talking and tried to give him time to tell me why he felt as he did”. You have the impression that Stewart did most of the talking when he met civil servants, so his bewilderment that they did not always like him or take his advice is rather touching.
Nuclear War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen:
Terrifying. And not even funny.
January 2024:
The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters, by Benjamin Moser:
An engaging account of a very literate and not particularly visual person getting to grips with the main Dutch painters of the 17th century. Pressed me to think, even when I disagreed with his judgments. Which was often – for instance, I couldn’t understand why he he described it as a “tragedy” that Jan Lievens did not develop a single core style in the way that Rembrandt did. This seemed like a version of the pathetic fallacy – transforming Moser’s sense that the work is less satisfying into a major life-problem for Lievens. Moser intrudes more on the reader than an art-critic should. But if – not if, when – I next return to the Netherlands with time to see some paintings I will want to have this book with me; I wouldn’t want to pass up enjoying his often spiky company.
What’s the Use of Philosophy? by Philip Kitcher:
There were many things in this that I liked. Kitcher sets out his stall and gives a credible account of why it’s rewarding to do the kind of philosophy he does. But gives only the sketchiest of reasons beyond invective to justify his regarding some other kinds of philosophy (mainstream metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of language, for instance) as sterile or pointless. What’s missing is an argument, grounded in the nature of higher education and the scarce resources available to universities, for why philosophy departments should concentrate more on Kitcher’s style of philosophy and less on traditional subjects like metaphysics. I’d have been open to such arguments, but was left with a feeling that I’d been given only the appetizer and was still waiting for the main course.
Short book reviews (fiction)
Here are some very short (one-paragraph) unpublished reviews of works of fiction I have enjoyed and would recommend for at least some readers. In the reverse order in which I read them, not of publication, so most recent reads first.
May 2025:
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke:
Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. I see Susanna Clarke in this novel as inverting the statement: magic (if it were real) would be indistinguishable from a sufficiently advanced technology. She imagines a period of a little over a decade in the history of early 19th century England (1806 to 1817) in which two real magicians practise real magic in ways that make a real difference to the country (especially in the conduct of the war with France). But these are not prophet-like men with deep access to ancient wisdom, and the message is not that the universe has more mysterious forces than we know (“there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…”). On the contrary, these are educated men who are also rivalrous, often petty, often very confused about what they are doing and why. They blunder about, sometimes producing spectacular achievements and sometimes failing ignominiously, bridling at minor slights and worrying more about their standing at court and in society than about their impact on the world. Just like real entrepreneurs, in fact. They fail to understand the underlying causal mechanisms they are setting in motion, and try to reverse-engineer their own skills from the effects they find themselves capable of producing. Rather like the purveyors of large language models of AI in our own time, they are as mystified as the onlookers by the extent of their powers, and they speculate as helplessly about it all as anyone else. Whereas most fantasy writers would have us believe that if magic were real, the world would be profoundly different, Susanna Clarke reminds us here that it might be different only in the details. Perhaps magic really does exist – we just call it “technology”. In the second half the novel becomes more sombre and more spectacular, with magical powers bubbling up everywhere, and the narrative becoming more conventionally fantasy-epic. At 846 pages it’s over-indulgent, but clearly many readers will be carried along. I was more seduced by the economy of her later novel Piranesi (see below).
April 2025:
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald:
This (like the Austen project below) was also provoked by a publication anniversary (it’s been exactly a century). One of my abiding images is of Gatsby himself, who does not drink alcohol, standing looking out over one of his parties where almost everyone else does; I think we are meant to feel some kind of envy for his sobriety. This reminded me of three things: the first was an evening perhaps 20 years ago at a Michelin starred restaurant in Puymirol (Lot-et-Garonne), where the famous chef Michel Trama came out to meet his guests, saying barely a word to any of them, and it occurred to me that he must be a very shy man who could not bear to talk to people under any other conditions than those of being the star. The second was that in almost all of Jane Austen, nobody enjoys the parties very much except in retrospect. The third was a passage in Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I am currently reading, where she writes what must be a satire of the parties in Jane Austen: “Surrounded by cross, hot strangers, your chance of rational conversation is equal to what it would be in an African desert. Your only wish is to preserve your favourite gown from the worst ravages of the crowd. Every body complains of the heat and the suffocation. But if it is all misery for the guests, then what of the wretchedness of those who have not been invited? Our sufferings are nothing to theirs! And we may tell each other tomorrow that it was a delightful party”. I wasn’t quite charmed enough by any of the characters in The Great Gatsby to feel their pain more than fleetingly. But for readers who are more moved than I am by Gatsby’s yearning, for authenticy but also for recognition, to be successful while still despising success, I can understand the magic of this portrayal.
March 2025:
Jane Austen at 250: a tragic Marxist feminist?
This subject has its own page here.
December 2024:
Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner:
At once a thriller and a philosophical novel, about a woman in her thirties whose freelance work is to infiltrate groups of radical activists in America and Europe on behalf of state or private organisations, inciting them to acts of violence that can then be used to destroy them. She moves to rural France to join a commune that both seeks to escape contemporary agro-capitalism and to commit acts of defiance against it. The plotting is deft and the characterisation subtle, and the philosophy closer to the unphilosophical essayism described here by Agnès Callard. It’s – fortunately – not so much a philosophy of capitalism as a philosophy of character (what she calls “salt”) which tries to identify what remains when an individual has been blindsided by everything life can throw at them. I finished it this morning (December 27th) and I can already sense that passages and scenes will remain with me for a long time into 2025 and perhaps beyond.
November 2024:
The House of Doors, by Tan Tan Eng:
Evocative imagination of a visit to Penang by Willie Somerset Maugham in 1921 that links the histories of Maugham, the first President of Republican China Sun Yet Sen and the convicted murderess Ethel Proudlock (all real people) through the eyes of Maugham’s fictitious hostess Lesley Hamlyn, the wife of a British lawyer. The prose is a little uneven for my taste, teetering between self-conscious poeticism and a sometimes clunking reaching for the aphorism. But the story is well structured, and the sense that all the characters have their multiple layers of secrets makes in the end for a compelling read. Its suggestion that it is the “real” version of events behind the story “The Letter” in Maugham’s The Casuarina Tree , which itself led to Maugham’s being considered persona non grata in the expatriate British community for having betrayed secrets, contributes to the intrigue.
October 2024:
Cent Million d’Années et Un Jour, by Jean-Baptiste Andrea:
A lyrical account of an expedition by a palaeontologist to discover what he is convinced is the site of a complete dinosaur skeleton in a remote valley in the Alps. A man’s struggle with himself, with his few companions and with the natural world. Images of glaciers and tiny men silhouetted against them.
September 2024:
Alice Munro:
NOTE: The news that Alice Munro remained silent over the abuse of her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner by Munro’s husband Gerald Fremlin has made me reluctant to return to the work of Munro, which I began to explore after Munro’s death, as reported in the next paragraph. I will do so in due course.
Since the death of Alice Munro, whose work I didn’t know, I’ve been trying to catch up on what makes this chronicler of small-town Canada so compelling. There seems to be no one place to start, so I’m undertaking a meandering tour of her many short stories in much the same way as she describes herself, her brother and her traveling salesman father making a tour of the rural Ontario countryside in “Walker Brothers Cowboy”, the first story in the collection A Wilderness Station: Selected Stories, 1968-1994. As some perceptive critic (I don’t remember who) pointed out, you don’t remember her sentences but you do remember her scenes. And her moods, I would add, and the perplexity everyone feels when the world doesn’t answer you in the way you’ve come to expect. The second story in the collection, “Dance of the Happy Shades”, is a delicious example of this: it starts with small-town gossip and backbiting and ends in quite unexpected epiphany. Others I’ve admired, and been bewitched by, include “The Beggar Maid”, in the same collection, “In Sight of the Lake”, in the collection Dear Life, and the well-known but nevertheless magnificent “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”, in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. The last two are particularly absorbing, and scary, for those of us with elderly relatives or nearing old age ourselves.
July 2024:
The Winding Stair, by Jesse Norman:
A gripping historical novel set at the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the beginning of the reign of King James I. It charts the rise and rivalry of Francis Bacon and Edward Coke, and along the way makes subtle points about how different visions of the law serve conflicting political and religious agendas. Stylistically owes much to Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, but still develops a recognisable voice of its own. An intellectually demanding read, but it keeps the story flowing and is never dull.
June 2024:
Columba’s Bones, by David Greig:
A disturbing tale of a community of monks on the Island on Iona, off the West coast of Scotland, in the year 825. They suffer a brutal attack from Viking raiders, in the aftermath of which a handful of survivors try to rebuild their lives on this lonely outpost. Violent but also surprisingly lyrical at moments. Spare prose, with vivid images.
May 2024:
Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke:
One of the most haunting novels I have read in years. Set in a fantastic dilapidated palace whose origin is never specified but whose relationship to the everyday world is radically reassessed as the story advances. Unlike anything else I know. A masterpiece.
Recent book reviews by me:
First, links to some short (one-paragraph) unpublished reviews of books I enjoyed and would recommend to at least some readers (I include here only books that stand out from the majority I read). There are only a few of these now (May 2025), but I will update them regularly as I read more.
Short reviews of recommended fiction.
Short reviews of recommended non-fiction.
Next, here are links to longer reviews I published in 2022-2025, beginning with the most recent:
Charles Hecker: Zero Sum: The Arc of International Business in Russia, in the Times Literary Supplement, 9 May 2025.
Robert Eisen: Jews, Judaism, and Success: How Religion Paved the Way to Modern Jewish Achievement
“O lucky man! What poker players do and don’t have in common with plutocrats”, a view of Nate Silver’s On The Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, in the Times Literary Supplement, 22 August 2024.
“Thomas Nagel: Moral Feelings, Moral Reality, and Moral Progress”, in Society, 06 February 2024.
This is part of a symposium on Nagel’s book; the other (gated) contributions to the symposium can be found here.
“Things can only get better? The ambivalent impact of innovation on society”, a review of Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson: Power and Progress: Our thousand-year struggle over technology and prosperity, in The Times Literary Supplement, July 14, 2023.
“Trouble in paradise. Why is economic progress so little cause for celebration?”, a review of J. Bradford DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia: An economic history of the twentieth century, in The Times Literary Supplement, 23 September 2022.
“Thomas Piketty: A Brief History of Inequality”, in Society, 31 January 2023.
“Please sir, can I have quite a lot more?”, a review of Sebastian Mallaby: The Power Law: venture capital and the art of disruption, The Times Literary Supplement, 18th February 2022.
Recommended Books in 2013
Because I have had so little time to write here about books I have read in 2013, but have still (fortunately) had time to read some, I thought I would make a list of some of the most memorable, without necessarily adding much commentary.
In the following; books given 5 Stars are enthusiastically recommended, and are on a part with the other books on my “Recommended books” page. But I will mention some others with lower ratings that are nevertheless interesting.
Some of these books were published in 2013 but not all. Books are in alphabetical order of author, five stars first then four stars.
I start with a few I can remember and will add more between now and Christmas, and hope to add a short commentary to each title before then.
* * * * *
Craig Childs: The Secret Knowledge of Water: “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning”. A strange and touching memoir of one man’s quest to find hidden water in the deserts of the South-Western United States.
Paul Collier: Exodus: How Migration Is Changing Our World
Sebastian Faulks: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells
Jonathan Haidt: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
Michel Houellebecq: La Carte et le Territoire
P.D. James: Death Comes to Pemberley
Barbara Kingsolver: The Poisonwood Bible
Jon Krakauer: Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Dany Laferiere: Comment Faire l’Amour à Un Nègre Sans Se Fatiguer
Hilary Mantel: Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies: Magnificent first and second books in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, chief counselor to King Henry 8th. Fascinating from many points of view, including for a subtle portrait of the corrupting effects of power. At the beginning Cromwell is apparently quite upset to hear about the effects of torture on heretics, while by the end of the first book he is sending political opponents to the stake or the executioner’s block, not exactly without a qualm but with a matter-of-fact acceptance that this follows from the policies to which he has become committed. Shows that the best way to make someone do something morally troubling is not to give them good arguments but simply to insinuate to them that it is the logical consequence of something else they have already decided to do. The second book sees this deadly logic applied to the destruction of Anne Boleyn.
Jan Morris: Conundrum
Siddhartha Mukherjee: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Chris Stringer: Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth
Alison Wolf: The XX Factor: How Working Women are Creating a New Society
* * * *
Alison Booth: Stillwater Creek
Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot
Richard Powers: Gain
Bhisham Sahni: Tamas
Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead
Richard Trivers: The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
* * *
Richard Rhodes: Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World