Magna Carta - The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015

Third Millennium are publishing a quite excellent book on Magna Carta edited by Professor Nicholas Vincent. It has a special Lincoln edition which highlights the particular role of this city in the Magna Carta story.

There is currently the opportunity to subscribe to this edition. Here is the link http://tmiltd.com/products/magna-carta-lincoln

I have had a sneak preview and find something totally absorbing. This ranges from the nature of law to the detail of just what the pressures were that brought it all together. But there is much more, it is the legacy of Magna Carta that truly matters. This is seen clearly in the constitution of the United States, but it is much wider. It is almost the legal air we breath, in much the same way as the christian heritage of 1000 years is the air we in the western world breath. It may not have detailed application but its influence in unmistakeable.

12 Years a Slave

This is a film you watch with an sense of reverence. The fully deserved plaudits for its makers are one reason, the gravity of the subject matter the other. Throughout the film the sound in my ear was 'Gott' the first word uttered by Florestan at the start of his aria in Beethoven's masterpiece, Fidelio. Florestan was imprisoned as a result of an abuse of power and it was only the love of his wife that saved him. But it is the parallel of abuse that struck me most strongly. Let no one say that Magna Carta is irrelevant. Power is abused each and every day and this only happens because ordinary people like you and me do nothing.

On Green Dolphin Street - Sebastian Faulks

I had avoided this book, having loved both Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, but then Engleby won my wholehearted respect. I took both On Green Dolphin Street and Ian McEwan's Enduring Love on holiday and started both. I am going to commit heresy. I found McEwan so well researched it was contrived, but Faulks, surely equally well researched, came to me natural from the page. It had more flavour, smell and touch.

Children of the sun

Simon Head offers an illuminating critique of the evolution of English elite to take full advantage of the extraordinary phenomenon of London as the global financial powerhouse.
Societies will always have their elites, but in England in the final third of the twentieth century, it looked as if the elite was broadening and becoming more porous. Head shows how the elite evolved from being simply the aristocracy to include leaders of the professions and financiers. Many of the elite families survived the transition and reinvented themselves. The public schools and Oxbridge  all serve to perpetuate this evolving elite.
What emerges is a society much closer in division to eighteenth century England, with an elite holding the majority of the wealth served by the remainder.
The banking collapse might have been seen as an end to this; in the event the elite not only survived but gained yet more strength.

Stop bashing bankers' bonuses

Today's Guardian reported Lord Turner running to the defence of those whom he had previously termed socially useless. This is all in the context of Vince Cable's speech to the LibDem conference where he stated his intention to shine a 'harsh light into the murky world of corporate behaviour.'
Turner rightly calls for policy changes to bring in the tight regulation which is vital if these massive institutions are to act in the interests of the customers and economies they serve.
It is a stark comparison to suggest that a bank might be bigger than the economy of the country in which it resides.
This is more than the anxieties over complex financial instruments about which I am writing in Broken Bonds, and much closer to Edward Heath's condemnation of the unacceptable face of capitalism which I recall was directed at Lonrho.

Broken Bonds at Port Eliot

At the Port Eliot Festival I read the first scene of the first draft of my novel. The unmoved sea of faces in the audience told me how it needs to bring the taste of breakage. The breakdown of trust is so damaging in many different areas of life. Its web reaches out and grabs the most unexpected bystander.
If we look now from a 2010 perspective, all the cuts about which we rightly moan have their origin in the down fall of the banks. Their collapse triggered the drying up of credit which in turn sent the economy into decline. But what was the real reason? The breakdown of trust?
I also read a completely different reflection on the festival. Can they connect?

Tulip Fever - Deborah Moggach

At the heart of this book is painting, portraiture. The writing seems to emanate from this heart with description that is often breathtaking and always illuminating.
The present tense delivery moves from one point of view to another, as each tiny section of the picture is composed and executed.
The plot is neat; at times it is exasperating, but soothed always by the prose which draws the reader on.