The Managerial Creed

Anything which smacks of the managerial is suspect these days – but have we really pinned down what it is we find so objectionable – apart from the proliferation of the breed and their counter-productivity? And, given the way Artificial Intelligence and robots threaten to make managers redundant, should we not just treat what James Burnham called (in 1941) the “managerial revolution” as an embarrassing hiccup?  

It’s difficult for younger people to realise there was once a time when managers hardly existed. I well remember when the concept of management first became fashionable in the UK – in the early 1970s, when professionals ruled the roost as accountants, engineers, educationalists, lawyers or medics. I have to confess to being part of the first generation which became enthusiasts for the promise of management. 

It was actually a priest in South America who most effectively set the cat amongst the pigeons of UK professionalism with his anarchistic critiques of the grip which educational and medical castes had on our minds - namely Ivan Illich of Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesis (1974) fame. I used to tour the various professional associations in Scotland in those years – using both the Illich critique and the insights I had gained as a Chair of one of the new Social Work Committees to challenge the conventional wisdoms of these professions.

And it was for this reason that, under the influence of John Stewart of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), I became an early convert to the idea of corporate planning and management which was then fashionable - although its time soon passed, with complaints about “silo management” being, if anything stronger  in recent years (see Gillian Tett’s 2015 book below). Getting agreement about priorities is, of course, the easy part – making those priorities stick when it comes to implementation is the rather more difficult part– particularly for political organisations.

I’ve had a curious relationship with management over the past half century – the first half of my adult life, from age 25, was spent as a reforming politician where the Directors of professional services were amongst my closest colleagues (my paid job in academia was a bit of a sideline). That changed in the second half of my life - when I entered the project management world of consultancy where I was generally Team Leader of small groups of professionals trying to develop the capacity of organisations in ex-communist countries. That was, quite frankly, very much a question of the blind leading the blind since we “westerners” were only subject specialists (usually of only one country’s system) and had little experience of change management – let alone understanding of the context in which we were working. So I made a point of doing my homework on what the literature of “change management” (which had started in the mid 1980s and was a decade later the most popular field) had to say. Out of historical interest, I’ve reproduced the Annotated Bibliography for change agents I did in those days. 

The blog has several times suggested that there are religious overtones to economics and management – culminating with this post last year which listed the relevant books, including The Faith of the Managers by Stephen Pattison (1998) 

By seeing much of modern management as in some ways a profoundly religious and ethical activity that looks different to those who are managed rather than managing, I hope to place it in a new light. Management is deified by some and demonized by others. Subjecting it to a partial critique that emphasizes religious and ethical features should help both protagonists and detractors to see management for what it is - a human activity with strengths, weaknesses, possibilities and pitfalls.

Management is an important and necessary function in the modern world. No organization that is in any sense organized can do without some kind of management function, and it is unhelpful and unrealistic to hope that management will go away or can be dispensed with.

Rather, management needs to be improved and made more effective.

This might be expedited in part by helping both managers and the managed to become more self-consciously aware and articulate about the nature of this activity and the assumptions upon which it rests.

Readers will be familiar with my view that we need shorter books – authors really do need to compress their thoughts more clearly and in a shorter format. There’s far too much padding. That’s why I favour those articles which try to give an overview of the literature on a subject. I see that I noticed this in what I think was the last post on managerialism  almost three years ago. The subject is, correctly in my view, now beginning to attract more attention. 

For the moment I aim to skim the books I’ve listed below – and then perhaps come back to you with my thoughts. I should emphasise that these are not management textbooks – or the pop-management stuff you buy in airports. They are rather the critical reflections on that body of crap.

The two best articles in the immediate list below are the Doran one and the last one 

Key Articles

NPM – the dark side of managerial enlightenment; Thomas Diefenbach (2000) Focused on the issues raised by the market-based new public management.

Managerialism – an ideology and its evolution; Christine Doran (2016) A very clear and useful overview of the literature

Managerialism and the continuing project of state reform Janet Newman and John Clarke (2016) A rather more academic treatment of aspects of public sector reform

A Zizekian Ideological critique of managerialism Keith Abbott (2018) A typically compressed and far too clever academic argument of a sort which gives academia a bad name

The Political Economy of Managerialism; Eagelton_Pearce and Kanfo (2020) which explores why this discipline seems to have ignored this issue

The Managerialist Credo; Glover, McGowan and Tracey (2021) A quite excellent overview of the topic

Books

Managerialism – the emergence of a new ideology by Willard Enteman (1993) rather pedantic treatment by a US academic focusing more on socialism, capitalism and democracy than on managerialism

Managing Britannia – culture and management in modern Britain; Robert Protherough and John Pick (2003) 

Against Management – organisation in the age of managerialism; Martin Parker (2004) I didn’t find this book all that interesting when I first skimmed it quite a few years ago – but that probably says more about my impatience with a lot of sociologists  

The Making of Modern Management – British management in historical perspective Wilson and Thomson (2006) Very thorough treatment by 2 British economic historians    

The Age of Heretics – a history of the radical thinkers who reinvented corporate management Art Kleiner (2008) a US journalist examines the past half century for key moments in a racey read.

Management and the Dominance of Managers – an inquiry into why and how managers rule our organisations; Thomas Diefenbach (2009) suggests that the question of how managers have gained their excessive power has not been sufficiently explored…..This article of his is in “academese” but you can still sense his concerns

Rethinking Management – radical insights from the complexity sciences; Chris Mowles (2011)

A delightful and very thoughtful book from an experienced consultant trying to rethink his profession from first principles….

Confronting Managerialism - How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance Robert R. Locke and J.-C. Spender (2011) Locke is an American Prof who has been very critical of managerialism

Managerialism – a critique of an ideology   Thomas Klikauer (2013) written by a German who started as an engineer and trade unionist and now teaches Australian MBA students, this is a superb and comprehensive attack on the pretensions of manageriaism.l

The Silo Effect – the peril of expertise Gillian Tett (2015) Tett is a financial journalist and anthropologist and this is a very practical attack on groupthink

Strategic management and organisational dynamics Ralph Stacey and Chris Mowles (2016) a very thorough and critical assessment which contrasts “realist” and “postmodern” approaches and suggests a better, more reflective way

The Triumph of Managerialism? New Technologies of Government and their implications for value edited by Anna Yeatman, Bogdan Costea (2018) Have only google excerpts

Anarchism, organisation and management Martin Parker (2020) This is an update to his 2004 book – he’s also published an interesting dictionary of alternative organisations

an ode to civilisation

 Sometimes a picture says it better

courtesy of https://scheerpost.com/

And will someone official deny this statement that senior US people are trying to extend the war

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/03/25/more-evidence-that-the-us-is-trying-to-prolong-this-war/

And thank God for Macron! 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/27/us-denies-it-is-seeking-regime-change-in-russia-after-biden-comments-putin

“Credentialism” as the dubious legacy of meritocracy

The very first political principle I found myself warming to as a teenager was that of “equality of opportunity” and that came from my reading of The Conservative Enemy – a programme for radical reform in the Sixties (1962) by Anthony Crosland author of the definitive revisionist “The Future of Socialism” (1956) which was one of the strands which had made a young socialist of me.

Although I read with fascination the early issues of New Left Review which started to appear in 1960, I was very much a middle-class revisionist. My family may have lived in a large mansion in the West End of a class-ridden Scottish shipbuilding town but we were penniless - the house was owned by the Church of Scotland since my Dad was a Reverend and earned what was called a “stipend” (just under 2,000 pounds a year). Unusually, he also became a councillor (then Bailie) as a member of the “Moderate (or Progressive)” party which acted as a balance between the town’s right-wing Liberal party (composed of lawyers, accountants and shopkeepers representing the town’s sugar and shipbuilding interests) and the Labour party representing the town’s workers.  

It was this awareness of straddling different worlds which very much made me who I am – and finds expression in the theory I’ve been advancing recently that people who change worlds (whether geographical or intellectual) are more creative. 

But, as always, I’ve gone off at a tangent - so “revenons aux moutons”. It was Michael Sandel’s “The Tyranny of Meritocracy” which took me back to the Sixties – since his starting point is Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) which was actually a satire on an idea which, forty years later, had become a toxic aspiration.

Sandel’s target is “credentialism” – 

the way that academic qualifications are now required for all top jobs

-       the resentment and humiliation this has created in those without educational qualifications

-       the hubris exuded by the successful and

-       the damage to democracy created by the amoral technocratic elite which now controls our lives

Reading it brought the sudden, awful thought that 60 years of government interventions do not seem to have brought any great change to UK social conditions –

·       Most of the current UK Cabinet are public schoolboys

·       Most of the higher civil service are educated at private schools which charge huge fees

·       Most of the sociological research points to the intensification of social privilege

Which raises the even worse possibility that the fatalists and postmodernists are correct in their argument that social interventions are to no avail. One of my favourite writers - AO Hirschmann – actually devoted a book (”The Rhetoric of Reaction”) to examining three arguments conservative writers use for dismissing the hopes of social reformers: 

- the perversity thesis holds that any purposive action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy.

- The futility thesis argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent.”

- the jeopardy thesis argues that the cost of the proposed change or reform is too high as it endangers some previous, precious accomplishment. 

Have a look at any argument against a proposed reform - you will find it a variant of these three. 

But let’s return to the development of “equality of opportunity” in the UK – at least as I was slowly beginning to understand it. In 1977 I was given the opportunity to publish this long article Community Development – its administrative and political challenge in a national  professional journal in which I explored the notion of representative democracy 

There is, I think, a relatively simple way in which to test the claims of those who argue that there is little scope for improve­ment in the operation of our democratic process and that any deficiencies art attributable to the faults of individuals rather than to the system. It involves looking at how new policies emerge and asking such questions as –

• how does government hear and act upon the signals from below?

·       how do "problems" get on the political "agenda"?

·       does the political and administrative process influence the type of problem picked up by government or the form in which it is presented?'

 

The assumption of our society, good "liberals" that most of us essentially are, is that the channels relating governors to governed are neutral and that the opportunity to articulate grievances and have these defined (if they are significant enough) as "problems" requiring action from authority is evenly distributed throughout society. This is what needs to be examined critically - the concept of grievance and the process by which government responds to grievances. "Problems" emerge because individuals or groups feel dissatisfied and articulate and organise that dissatisfaction in an influential way which makes it difficult for government to resist.

"Grievance" or "dissatisfaction" is not. however, a simple concept - it arises when a judgement is made that events fall short of what one has reason to expect. Grievance is a function of expectations and performance - both of which are relative and vary from individual to individual - or. more significantly, from group to group. 

I then looked at how grievances were expressed and organised and suggested that this posed the following questions -

 

1 Do all groups in our society have the same expectations about government or (say) the social services?

2 Do all groups share roughly the same level of critical perception of their own achievement?

3 Is the capacity to articulate grievances equally distributed in society?

4 Is the capacity to organise that articula­tion equally distributed?

5 Is the process by which the political system picks up signals a neutral one?

6 is the process by which civil servants define problems and collect information a random one?

7 Does the way our decisions are taken and implemented affect the chance of their subsequent success?

 

Community development grew in the 1960s as, increasingly, negative answers were given to these sorts of questions" and - perhaps more significantly - confidence grew that the situation could be changed.

Damn these software engineers

Why do IT people always assume that "improvements" mean better??? My website host has suddenly brought in a new style which has made my life a misery and the blog an aesthetic disaster.

 - the new software seems unable to allow new lines!! 

 - The hyperlinks which are embedded in my text no longer work. I have to find each url again, copy each one and then insert them one by one into the post 

the text which I was previously able to copy directly into the website in the precise format which I wanted no longer differentiates between large and small

 - italics and bold I have to insert afresh

 - other issues which I can't be bothered to write about 

 I want out! 

 At one fell swoop the software engineers have removed all enjoyment I had in uploading text to the blog!

Update; No reply yet from blogpost people - but I have been able to change the format - by clicking a hidden icon which then gave me an option of "compose view". And I've just successfully posted text with hyperlinks......so we could just be back in business!!

AND INDEED WE ARE. I've just uploaded a new post - successfully. 

We ARE back in business - just as before. For which MANY THANKS to the blogpost people for what has been a great site. I had been looking at other options - but they all posed problems for me.....

Humiliation as a force in international relations

“The Economic Consequences of the Peace” was a famous and influential book written by John Maynard Keynes in 1919 from his experience of being drafted as a very young economist to the British delegation to the Versailles Treaty which settled the boundaries both of Europe and wider afield at the end of the First World War.

It argued strongly – and presciently - that the reparations demanded of Germany were not only humiliating and unjust but would fan the flames of resentment.

I find it strange how seldom the notion of humiliation comes up in the literature of international relations. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the West saw the opportunities -  both economic and geo-political - and has, in different ways, gone out of its way to humiliate the rump state of Russia. The very highly-regarded George Kennan was one of several senior US statesmen to express grave warnings (in 1998) about the dangerous path being taken in extending NATO eastwards – 

“I think it is the beginning of a new cold war,” Kennan stated. ”The Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else”. 

Thousands of books have been written about the collapse of the Soviet Union but only a few have tried to deal with the enigma of the “Russian soul”. Natasha’s Dance – a cultural history of Russia by Orlando Figes (2002) is one of these rarities. A more political one is Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom – Russia, Europe, America” (2018) about which I was less than complimentary when I first read it – although I do remember the section on Ivan Ilyan making an impact.

Snyder may be American but has made Russia and the wider region very much his speciality as an historian. I’ve been moved by the war to start rereading “The Road to Unfreedom” and certainly find the Introduction doesn’t deserve the criticisms made by the famous UK historian referred to in the link embedded in the title. Perhaps he found the text too poetic – with its contrast of the “politics of inevitability” with the “politics of eternity”?

 

The financial crisis of 2008 and the deregulation of campaign contributions in the United States in 2010 magnified the influence of the wealthy and reduced that of voters. As economic inequality grew, time horizons shrank, and fewer Americans believed that the future held a better version of the present. Lacking a functional state that assured basic social goods taken for granted elsewhere—education, pensions, health care, transport, parental leave, vacations—Americans could be overwhelmed by each day, and lose a sense of the future.

The collapse of the politics of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the politics of eternity. Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past.

 

Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do.

Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats. Progress gives way to doom.

Once in power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion. To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present.

In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens. Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling. 

I actually find this contrast quite enlightening…

One book highly relevant to understanding the psychology of national humiliation is

 The Light that Failed - why the west is losing the fight for democracy by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes (2019) although it focuses more on Hungary and Poland than Russia. But it does give a better sense of the dynamics of national humiliation better than any other book I know 

Pursuing economic and political reform by imitating a foreign model, however, turned out to have steeper moral and psychological downsides than many had originally expected.

The imitator’s life inescapably produces feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, dependency, lost identity, and involuntary insincerity. Indeed, the futile struggle to create a truly credible copy of an idealized model involves a never-ending torment of self-criticism if not self-contempt.

 

What makes imitation so irksome is not only the implicit assumption that the mimic is somehow morally and humanly inferior to the model. It also entails the assumption that central and eastern Europe’s copycat nations accept the West’s right to evaluate their success or failure at living up to Western standards.

In this sense, imitation comes to feel like a loss of sovereignty.

Thus, the rise of authoritarian chauvinism and xenophobia in central and eastern Europe has its roots not in political theory, but in political psychology. It reflects a deep-seated disgust at the post-1989 ‘imitation imperative’, with all its demeaning and humiliating implications.  

And this piece by Michael Brenner is one of the only attempts I’ve seen to link the war in Ukraine to the theme.

In case readers feel that the posts are too clinical – here’s the harrowing diary of a Russian-speaking volunteer at a Polish village on an exit point from Ukraine 

Further Reading

“Natasha’s Dance – the cultural history of Russia” can be downloaded in full here

Politics of the past – the uses and abuses of history (the socialist group of the European Parliament 2009)

https://www.bisa.ac.uk/articles/losing-control-chequered-history

Losing Control – global security in the 21^st Century; Paul Rogers (2021)

https://www.humiliationstudies.org/

https://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/evelin/HitlerBroadMasses.pdf

Is this really what the West wants?

The West has not declared war officially on Russia and yet, to all intents and purposes, we are at war with the country. What else is the combination of sanctions and supplies of weapons to Ukraine? The western media – led by the poisonous US channels which strangely imagine themselves safely out of range of Putin’s missiles – have been hyping us all up. 

And we have every reason to be disgusted by the scenes of massacre being enacted before our eyes. Sadly, such scenes have been blocked to Russian citizens – who, for the past 2weeks, have seen only what heavy censorship allows them to see.   

I have just discovered, however, one Russian whose blog has been able to give us a sense of how things are seen on their side. As it happens, he is someone whose writing I have admired for the past few years – from his “Reinventing Collapse – the Russian Experience and American Prospects” (2011) to “Shrinking the Technosphere” (2016). He belongs to those who consider that our days are numbered and was, last I heard more than a year ago, living on a boat and posting on Club Orlov. He seems, however, to have pulled up anchor and returned to Russia - since today I was astonished to hear him say he was “happy to be back in Russia” and then, effectively (in both senses of the word), justifying the Ukraine “operations”.

And, sure enough, when I googled his blog, it was to discover that this has been his position since 2014. Let me repeat – this is someone whose writing I have admired for some years even if it occasionally seemed a bit excessive. But his perceptions of the direction the US has been taking in recent decades are widely shared - it was only a year ago this post made the point that in no way can we consider the US to be a democracy. The military do what they want and I have some sympathy with Orlov's point that, since 2014, Ukraine has been treated as a US colony.

The US website which contains his interview certainly feels under threat and my friends in the highly reputable Scheerpost would agree. This is where the limits of free speech begin to be tested. But it's much more than that - we need to pull back a bit and ask how on earth we reached this dangerous point. 

Basically we took our eye off the ball in 2014 - that seems to have been the point at which we started to ignore what was happening in Ukraine.....This is, of course, no excuse for the brutal murders being committed on civilians by Russian soldiers. But it does mean that we need to call a halt to the oversimplification and tribalism that is going on. I’ve selected this contribution from four analysts who are trying to help us assess how Putin should be dealt with -

 One of the triggers for Russia’s aggression against Ukraine seems to have been the mixed signalling over Ukraine’s Nato membership, which was neither ruled out nor firmly ruled in.

Nato and the EU both need to decide, and to communicate clearly, whether they plan to admit the remaining post-Soviet states that want to become members, and what the relationship with them will look like if they don’t. 

At the same time, even if it is unpalatable to talk about it now, there will also need to be engagement with the Russian government in some areas, as there was between the west and the USSR even in dark periods of the cold war such as the early 1980s. 

The most important area will probably be nuclear arms control. The western debate about a no-fly zone and the Russian government’s inflammatory, if vague, threats about nuclear weapons are a sharp reminder of the threat of escalation between nuclear superpowers – a threat that, worryingly, many seemed to have forgotten or dismissed. However hostile the relationship between Russia and the west becomes, dialogue on nuclear matters needs to be maintained. 

Similarly, some level of continuing military-to-military diplomatic contact on other issues will remain important – more important, in fact, than it has been in periods of better relations. Channels of communication between militaries are important for reducing the risk of miscalculation, even where they are unlikely to build much trust. 

Finally, the west will need to think about how it tries to engage with Russian society. Closing off all contact will simply confirm Putin’s narrative that the west wants to destroy Russia. States need to keep their doors open to Russians who want to study or visit, as well as those who are escaping repression. None of this is going to be easy, and much of it may fall foul of domestic pressures, wishful thinking, and splits within the EU and Nato. But Europe and the US’s future security depends on recognising that we are in a moment of acute danger, and that we are all in it together.

 

Schwarzenegger v Biden - who has the better grasp of psychology?

 It has been Arnold Schwarzenegger - of all people – who has shown the way with his superb video on Twitter (and, perhaps more importantly, on his still unblocked Russian Telegram account) appealing to Russian soldiers and civilians alike.

A masterpiece in messaging, it starts with a convincing account – with subtitles in Russian - of the first hero in his life (a Russian weightlifter) and the importance to him of his Russian fans before telling them they are being lied to. He ends with a short message to Putin. 

Contrast that with the self-indulgent and counterproductive message of Joe Biden who dares to call Putin a war criminal. His epithet is appropriate - but it comes from someone who joins a string of US Presidents who have inflicted mass murder of countless innocent citizens of so many nations. And it is these same US Presidents who joined forces with Russia in refusing to join the International Criminal Court at The Hague. And refused to sign the International Convention on Cluster Munitions. The refusal of both countries to join is all the proof we need of the evil embodied in both systems. 

En passant, I should note that the official blocking of Western social media in Russia, hasn’t stopped eight brave Russian readers from showing up yesterday on my blog statistics. Six months ago they were leading the pack. 

Against Nihilism

Violence and viruses have snuffed the life from millions of people these past few years. The increasing sight of mass graves suggest a growing indifference to the value of the individual life. Remember how easily people talked a couple of years ago of the “culling” of the elderly – adding the phrase to the euphemisms which imperial governments have been using increasingly in the past half-century such as “friendly fire” and “collateral damage”. With the global population growing in only 20 years from 6 billion to 8 billion, it is little wonder that we can’t share Steven Pinker’s optimism about human aggression. 

Nor that, beneath our civilised veneer, we are beginning to pose questions about the readiness with which Russian leaders have been willing to sacrifice millions of individuals over the past century. 

“One death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic” was first attributed to Stalin in 1947 as ‘If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics’. 

I for one will never forget a conversation with a young Russian interpreter in St Petersburg in January 1991 when I was on a WHO mission to the city - when she spoke about how meaningless life was for her as a Russian.  

 

With Ukraine descending into hell, I stumbled yesterday – via an article and book about the country’s cultural heritage – into the field of memoirs which I last posted about some 7 years ago.

Somehow, against such slaughter, it seemed appropriate to assert that life has value – and should be lived to the full. The website Lives Retold reminded me of Theodor Zeldin’s great venture of self-portraits – with Roman Krznaric’s (of “Carpe Diem” and “The Good Ancestor” fame) being perhaps the most thoughtful. 

 

Other examples of people who led fascinating lives and whose account of them avoids the vanity of most autobiographical efforts are –

·       Dennis Healey’s “Time of my Life” (1989) - a beautifully-written and wry study of the political life at a time when politics mattered – with a dash of culture thrown in.

·       En passant he mentions that Leonard Woolf’s 5-volume “Memoirs” were an inspiration and, when I eventually got round to reading them, they proved to be one of the best in the English language both for its insights into social aspects and personalities of the time

·       “Moments of Being” is a marvellous posthumous collection of Virginia Woolf’s autobiographical writings.  

·       Arthur Koestler's four volumes - "an unrivalled study", as the blurb on the back of the third volume ("The Invisible Writing") puts it, "of twentieth century man and his dilemmas"

·       Elias Canetti’s 4 volumes; “the Tongue set Free”; “The Torch in my Ear”; “The Play in the Eyes”; “Party in the Blitz” are somewhat more caustic and show the less attractive side of humanity

·       Speak, Memory Vladimir Nabokov is in a genre of its own – with a mixture of styles

·       My Happy Days in Hell; Gyorgy Faludy (1962) amazing, poetic and life-affirming memoir from an émigré who returned to communist Hungary in full knowledge that he would be thrown into jail (where he spent 3 harrowing years)

·       Victor Serge’s Memoir of a Revolutionary best conveys the self-sacrifice involved in the harrowing struggles for a better world in the first few decades of the 20^th century

·       Gregor von Rezzori’s trilogy of novels were based on the life he lived in Czernowitz which was then in Romania

·       The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig which I rate as the best simply because it is so self-effacing

·       My Century – the odyssey of a Polish Intellectual is Aleksander Wat’s stunning memoir which rates with Faludy, Koestler, Serge and Zweig.

·       The various volumes of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography conveyed for me a powerful sense of an exciting new Europe taking shape in the post-war rubble. All Said and Done is the last.

·       graphic artist Tisa von Schulenberg’s harrowing little book “Ich Hab’s Gewagt” tells the tale of a woman who left privilege behind to pursue a life of art and integrity….

·       I also thoroughly enjoyed historian Fritz Stern’s “Five Germanies I have known”

·       And Gunther Grass’s so poetic “Peeling the Onion”

·       Poet Dannie Abse’s “Goodbye Twentieth Century” is a gentle memoir

·       Diane Athill’s various Memoirs are as good as they get

·       Des Wilson, the great campaigner, I knew briefly in the late 70s and he was good enough to send me his rumbustious “Memoirs of a Minor Public Figure”

·       JK Galbraith’s “A Life in Our Times; Memoirs” offer an unsurpassable repast of memories and intellectual musings

·       Clive James’ voluminous output is almost unclassifiable – memoirs, essays, notes – give a real insight into a great mind, prolific reader and writer of prose which jumps off the page – for example Cultural Amnesia – necessary memories from history and the arts

·       Amitai Etzioni (“My Brother’s Keeper”) and Richard Rose ( jazzily entitled Learning about Politics in Time and Space) are two prolific academics whose foray into Memoir help us understand the process of intellectual development 

·       Herbert Simon was an amazing polymath who launched the post-war interest in decision-making. The intro to his memoir Models of My Life (1996) is one of the best

·       The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880-1937 cover German culture and politics during this period

·       The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt was written on his death bed at the tragically early age of 62 and gives a powerful sense of what we have lost with his death

·       Journalist Sebastian Haffner – who had to leave Germany in 1933 and whose Germany – Jekyll and Hyde made a huge impact when it was published in 1940

 The Hooligan’s Return; Norman Manea (2003) a Romanian émigré much esteemed in the US paints a powerful picture of post-war Romania

·       An Encyclopaedia of Myself; Jonathan Meades (2014) pyrotechnics from a rumbustious life

·       The Pigeon Tunnel – stories from my life; John le Carre (2016) UK’s greatest spywriter’s memoir

·      Making the Most of it; Bryan Magee (2018) epub Final part of a spell-binding trilogy which started with “Clouds of Glory – a Hoxton Childhood” (2003) and “Growing up in a War” (2007) which resonate with the honesty and clarity this amazing philosopher/politician/interviewer embodied.

·       Je Chemine avec Susan George (2020) It’s an epub so needs conversion! George is a French/American radical political scientist and gives a sense of her political journey in these interviews

·       What Does Jeremy think? Is a rare biography of a top British civil servant

An Heretical Heir to the Enlightenment – politics, policy and science in the work of Charles Lindblom ed Harry Redner (1993) takes 110 propositions attributed to him by his colleagues in this tribute to his work and assesses their veracity

Models of My Life; Herbert Simon (1991)

A Synthesising Mind – a memoir; Howard Gardner (2020)