November 22, 2017

From The Economist:

Old age, the OECD notes, is a “leveller”.

From Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote (quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky's Winter Notes on Summer Impressions):

Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

From The Guardian (Nicola Barker on "My writing day"):

When I am writing a big novel my desk is covered in dozens of half-read books. Sometimes I take notes in jotters but I rarely return to them. Often I scribble in the text. I am very disrespectful. I like mini Post-its in different colours. When I wrote The Cauliflower I had about 50 books scattered around me at all times, each one with 40 or more Post-its poking out. The texts will generally be frantically underlined (I also draw little pointy fingers and scribble three stars if something is VERY IMPORTANT. There will be much NB-ing). With that novel I needed to remember where certain facts/aphorisms/biographical anecdotes were. Some days I would spend six or seven hours searching for something and not manage to locate it. That was soul destroying.

From The Economist:

In poorer ones, rising incomes and the spread of mobile phones will bring more shoppers online. In China, although growth in e-commerce has slowed, Goldman Sachs, a bank, still expects online spending to more than double between 2016 and 2020, to make up nearly one-third of total retail sales. In America, Euromonitor predicts that its share will rise from about one-tenth last year to about one-sixth in 2021. In Britain the figure may rise to one-fifth.

From The TLS (Lucy Beckett on Books of the Year 2017):

Elizabeth Buettner’s Europe after Empire: Decolonization, society, and culture (Cambridge) is a comparative study of the loss of empire and its consequences in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal. In particular it is a study of the different but parallel ways in which memories of these empires and their endings – messy, more or less protracted, more or less bloody, and resulting in major movements of people into and out of ex-imperial countries – have been blurred, distorted and manipulated, with many destructive consequences. This remembering and forgetting, overlaid by the Second World War and the EU, and reflected in both high and everyday culture, needs the intelligent dissection which this book, deeply researched but also engagingly written, richly provides. It deserves a wide readership.

John le Carré at eighty-five demonstrates in A Legacy of Spies (Penguin) his undiminished mastery of plot, tension and above all, dialogue.