January 20, 2018

From The Guardian (Jim Crace on "The book that had the greatest influence on my writing"):

Roget’s Thesaurus – but it has to be the 1955 Everyman’s edition as that’s the one my father gave me on my 10th birthday. I thought it was an inexplicable present at the time (where was my Meccano?) but it’s been at my side ever since and has given undeserved range and depth to my writing.

From The New York Times (Simon Sebag Montefiore on "Tell us about the last great book you read"):

I read many wonderful novels though I now find the idea of literary fiction obsolete. Few qualify as “great” in the sense of Tolstoy or Balzac but I just finished one that did: I was dazzled by the brilliance of “The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt, a masterpiece of characterization, plot, technical artistry combined with exquisite heartbreaking understanding of loss, love and art. Now that I have finished I regret its pleasures are gone, like a delicious feast — or a vanished love one will never know again.

From The New York Times (Simon Sebag Montefiore on "Which historians and biographers do you most admire?"):

Great inspirations have been classics like Antonia Fraser (“Cromwell”); Simon Schama (“Citizens”), Robert Caro (Lyndon B. Johnson); Robert K. Massie (“Peter the Great”); Hugh Thomas (“Conquest: Cortes, Montezuma, and the Fall of Old Mexico”); Duff Cooper (“Talleyrand”); John Hemming (“The Conquest of the Incas”); Doris Kearns Goodwin (“Team of Rivals”); Jean Lacouture (“De Gaulle”). Most of all, I admired the late Isabel de Madariaga, the author of “Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great,” who taught me to write Russian history as I was starting my first one, “Catherine the Great & Potemkin,” which she supervised with an imperious but indulgent severity that recalled the empress herself.

From The New York Times (Simon Sebag Montefiore on "And which novelists do you especially enjoy reading?"):

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz ranks up there with Tolstoy, as does “The Family Moskat,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, and “Remembrance of Things Past,” by Proust. I adore everything by Balzac and Zola but especially “The Kill,” which has one of the most beautiful seduction scenes in literature. Everything by Joseph Roth, especially “Hotel Savoy.” From American writers: Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” quartet; Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian”; Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain”; E. L. Doctorow’s “Billy Bathgate”; Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence”; James Salter’s “All That Is”; and the early novels of Norman Mailer. Amongst modern writers I enjoy le Carré, Sarah Waters, Hilary Mantel, Don “The Cartel” Winslow, Alan Furst and Gary Shteyngart. I just finished the Irish novelist Sebastian Barry’s “Days Without End” — outstanding.

From The Journal of Politics:

This article examines the effects of natural resource extraction on authoritarian governments’ provision of public services, using subnational data from China. Facing no electoral constraint that would reflect the policy preferences of citizens, Chinese local leaders instead allocate public funds differentially based on their need for quality labor in local economic development, a critical criterion for their political success. When the local economy benefits from natural resources, the need for skilled local labor dissipates, and leaders invest less in social services that enhance labor productivity. Using panel data across all prefecture-level cities (1992–2010), I find evidence that mineral resource abundance leads local governments to provide fewer public services for education and health care. Meanwhile, services unrelated to labor quality remain unaffected. The results are robust to the inclusion of key confounding factors such as FDI inflows and state-owned enterprises’ output contributions. Additional analyses reject alternative mechanisms including political turnover.