Oliver Kamm

Memoir of the millennium

I've just noticed that The Independent too discusses political memoirs today. The author of the article, Paul Vallely, does not appear to have first-hand knowledge of all the works under discussion. Noting the sheer number of memoirs written by ministers who served under Mrs Thatcher, Vallely writes: "Yet others offer only ammunition for political tittering, such as Norman Fowler's The Minister Decides (the only thing Norman never did, quipped one wag)."

No, no, no! All connoisseurs of the genre know that the title of Lord Fowler's 1991 masterpiece is Ministers Decide. Note the plural. It is an expression of both modesty and collegiality.

I have read this volume. I have to concede that it ought never to have been commissioned; and once commissioned, it ought not to have been published. It is as enervating and trivial as posterity records. Fowler has nary a bad word for anyone. A photograph of the minister flanked by Edwina Currie and a beaming John Major symbolises the author's not really knowing what goes on around him. I should record that Fowler, a former journalist, names Martin Bell as one of his broadcasting heroes (p. 63). He also concludes with prescience: "In John Major, Margaret Thatcher had the successor she wanted. What he achieves will be different, but it will be built on the foundation of the Thatcher years."

Not the whole story

This post appears on "Comment is Free". It is a response to a piece published in Saturday's edition of The Guardian by the playwright David Edgar.

In his essay on "political renegades", David Edgar informs us that he "became interested in the politics of defection in the late 1970s". No one could accuse him, on the evidence of this article, of having used the intervening three decades to acquire mastery of his brief.

The name of the former Ramparts editor turned aggressive rightwing activist is David Horowitz, not Horovitz. The critic of welfare provision whom Edgar names as Robert Nesbit is, in reality, the late sociologist and historian Robert Nisbet. Edgar castigates the opposition of the educationalist Nathan Glazer to affirmative action for ethnic minorities, yet lacks the candour or possibly the knowledge to add that Glazer - fearing a resegregation of the academy - outspokenly changed his mind on the issue in the 1990s. The social theorist Daniel Bell, whose seminal writings might profitably be consulted by those who imagine Noam Chomsky to be a leading public intellectual in the field, is in no identifiable sense a neoconservative. Bell broke politically with his friend Irving Kristol, the founding father of neoconservatism, in 1972, when Kristol backed Richard Nixon for president while Bell supported George McGovern. To my knowledge, Bell has never amended his ideological self-identification (in his most famous book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism), as a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture.

If you want an informed account of the political literature and personalities of an earlier generation, Edgar is not your man. Turning to Edgar's treatment of more recent debate, I cannot be so generous. As Andrew Anthony states, if you consider Ed Husain's rejection of the theocratic, misogynist and antisemitic organisation Hizb ut-Tahrir as part of the literature of rightwing defection, then your political bearings are severely awry. I make merely two additional points to Andrew's critique.

First, while complaining that "there is a tendency to see the world in stark, binary terms" on the part of those he tendentiously designates defectors, Edgar is either heedless or ignorant of the political heterogeneity of the people he is dealing with. Melanie Phillips, for example, decries what she calls the libertine (ie, permissive) society, praises Vladimir Putin's opposition to Kosovan independence, and writes sympathetically of intelligent design. These views are - I understate on a grand operatic scale - not widely held among the rest of Edgar's targets. Nor are they held by me.

Second, Edgar outdoes himself in risible equivocation when he observes: "No one on the progressive liberal left can be comfortable with any of the religions of the book, particularly when literally applied." Edgar counts so many unexceptionable positions as rightwing apostasy that he will probably do the same with this one. But I insist that secularism is essential to progressive ideals. By secularism, I mean not "discomfort" with organised religion, but the complete relegation of religious authority from public life.

As it happens, Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain - who has not been backward in inveighing against the "Zionist-controlled" nature of the British media - is not quite the dreamy idealist that Edgar imagines. But even if he were, the MCB would remain merely a sectional interest with no specialist knowledge in public policy and nothing to contribute to it. Progressive politics is committed to the defence of religious liberty, not to granting a respectful hearing to religious authority. Religious observance is a matter for the private sphere alone. The only civic arrangement progressives recognise is common citizenship under a single, secular and universal rule of law.

While purporting to describe historical parallels among leftwing defectors, Edgar noticeably omits the most significant of such figures in American intellectual life in the last century. This was the pragmatist philosopher and socialist Sidney Hook. Hook supported the Communist party's candidate for president in 1932, William Z Foster, yet later became a fierce opponent of communism and a supporter of the west in the cold war. What Hook - a brilliant and sympathetic interpreter of the thought of Karl Marx - never did was to abandon his belief in social democracy, the welfare state, steeply progressive income tax, secular humanism, and free choice on abortion. He did not fit Edgar's own law of the "tendency of ex-radicals to become very conservative indeed", unless you assume that anti-totalitarianism is by definition a conservative position.

In an address entitled "A Critique of Conservatism", delivered to a conference of social democrats in 1976, Hook described the challenge for adherents of a free society:

"The differences between conservatives and liberals, when the terms are reasonably construed, are family differences among adherents of a free society, defined as one whose institutions ultimately rest on the consent of those affected by their operations. When the security of a free society is threatened by aggressive totalitarianism, these differences must be temporarily subordinated to the common interest in its survival. There is always the danger that in the ever-present and sometimes heated struggles between liberals and conservatives, each group may come to fear the other more than their common enemy. If and when that happens, the darkness of what Marx called 'Asiatic despotism', in modern dress to be sure, will descend upon the world."

This is almost a prophetic description of the state of politics in the early 21st century. Those of us who share Hook's concerns are not the ones reneging on progressive politics.

No smoke, fire, or truth in anti-war book

This article is posted on the "Pajamas Media" site. It discusses a new book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilisation by Nicholson Baker, to be published in the UK next month.

In his new book, Human Smoke (New York: Simon and Schuster), Nicholson Baker gives this account of the views of Mohandas K. Gandhi in November 1938: “Even if the Allies were to go to war against Germany, Gandhi said, their action could bring to the Jews no inner joy or strength. Inner joy came from suffering voluntarily forgone.”

Baker is an accomplished novelist, but remarkably, his account of Gandhi’s views is not fictional. Baker moreover sees nothing wrong in them; and this is more remarkable still. So far as I can work out from my own conversations with an admittedly very limited sample of those who witnessed the Nazis’ racial policies, the number of European Jews who secured inner joy from their experience of ghettos, cattle trains, and gas chambers was zero.

Human Smoke purports to be a historical account of the political and social origins of WWII, drawn mainly from primary sources. If you imagine that primary sources equate to original research, then think again. Baker’s sources are not the records of statecraft. They are predominantly newspaper cuttings, shorn of context and confined entirely to English-language publications. It is an understatement to say that Baker lacks a historian’s interpretative ability to make sense even of these.

The resulting farrago neatly and with deliberation indicts political leaders of whatever power, and sentimentalizes the voices of those who opposed war. Human Smoke is a trivial, tendentious, ignorant, and more than moderately disgusting work dedicated to the proposition that the pacifist campaigners of the 1930s were heroes of the era. “They failed,” writes Baker in his concluding sentence, “but they were right.”

The most generous thing you can say about Baker’s thesis is that it is not of his own devising. It is a startlingly hackneyed restatement of the popular notion that: “Great armaments lead inevitably to war. The increase of armaments … produces a consciousness of the strength of other nations and a sense of fear.”

Those words are not Baker’s. They were written in 1925 by Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of WWI. Grey’s view exercised a powerful influence on British diplomacy in the inter-war years. The tragedy is that it was wrong.

It is not true that arms races inevitably lead to war. (The rivalry of the late nineteenth century, whereby France and Russia challenged British naval supremacy, concluded with the Entente Cordiale of 1904 and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.) It was not true that the British-German naval arms race of the early twentieth century led to WWI. (Great Britain entered WWI under a Liberal Government that, after its landslide election victory of 1906, had in fact sought international disarmament under the auspices of the Second Hague Conference.) Above all, it was catastrophically untrue that arms competition and the interests of big business, rather than the imperialist designs of the Axis powers, led to WWII.

In the absence of serious historical scrutiny, Baker offers Manichean counterpoint. Churchill and Roosevelt are fingered for having made sly (and sometimes not so sly) antisemitic insinuations. Pacifist campaigners, on the other hand, “tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening.”

There was in reality a far from trivial overlap between the organized peace movement and pro-German sympathizers. The chairman of the Peace Pledge Union (the principal pacifist body in Britain), Canon Stuart Morris, held membership in the antisemitic and pro-Nazi organization known as The Link. The popular novelist and prominent America First speaker Kathleen Norris lauded the patently racist Charles Lindbergh as “America’s Joan of Arc”. (Baker cites a few American pacifist campaigners, but prudently if conspicuously omits that one.)

Baker’s quixotic thesis has been widely dismissed by reviewers, but not in my view with sufficient derision. There is an instructive parallel here with the work of Baker’s most favorable reviewer, the popular author Mark Kurlansky. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Kurlansky marveled: “It may be one of the most important books you will ever read. It could help the world to understand that there is no Just War, there is just war — and that wars are not caused by isolationists and peaceniks but by the promoters of warfare.”

Kurlansky’s byline notes his own related book Nonviolence: 25 Lessons From the History of a Dangerous Idea, which was respectfully and even generously reviewed on publication in 2006. When Kurlansky came to London to promote it, I debated his thesis with him on a television news program. I pointed out that, in rubbishing the notion that the struggle against Nazism was a just war, Kurlansky had taken one part of his argument directly from the discredited work of the Holocaust denier David Irving.

Kurlansky was visibly upset by my comment, but I was right. The point at issue was Kurlansky’s claim (p. 141 of his book) that “historians estimate that between 100,000 and 130,000 people” died in the Allied bombing of Dresden. They do not: they estimate the true figure at around 25,000-30,000. As the judge in the David Irving libel case of 2000, Mr Justice Gray, succinctly observed: “In my judgment the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths which Irving continued to put about in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as no responsible historian would have made.”

Neither Baker nor Kurlansky is a historian, let alone a responsible one. The only interesting aspect of their writing is how easily protesters against war can assimilate the mythology of those who are not anti-war, but anti-American and anti-British.

Kate Jones

The Times carries an obituary today for the literary agent Kate Jones, who has died of liver cancer at the age of 46. Kate showed loyalty beyond the call of professional obligation to her authors, as the obituary makes clear in just a sentence: "During her post-cancer sabbatical, Jones took on the unrestful task of being Martin Bell’s agent for his campaign in the 1997 general election, when he stood as an Independent against Neil Hamilton in the 'safe' Conservative seat of Tatton, and won."

Those who watched the 1997 election results on television (I attended the Tatton count, but later saw the BBC election video) may just recall an image of Martin standing in front of a seven-foot transvestite, while flanked by my cousin Melissa and also by Kate, her arms aloft in triumph. It's easy to be wise after the event, when we know the damage that Mr Hamilton had inflicted not only on his reputation but also on the fortunes of the Conservative Party nationally. But it was quite an undertaking to be election agent in a quixotic campaign for what was nominally one of the Tories' safest seats (and is now again, with George Osborne as the sitting MP). Kate did it with style and congeniality, and complete success. I last saw her in May, when old friends from that venture held a dinner to mark the tenth anniversary of the Tatton campaign. I shall remember her with great respect and affection. And while I'm saddened by Kate's passing, I relished the penultimate sentence of her obituary: "When liver cancer was diagnosed and found to be incurable, only five days before she died, she and her husband drew up a short but pleasing list of people she would thankfully never have to deal with again."

Our policy in Iraq

Earlier in the week I went on Press TV, the English-language channel of the Iranian state-run broadcaster. It was for a book programme called "Epilogue", whose host is the journalist Martin Short. I'm afraid I don't know when the programme will be shown - presumably it will be during the coming week. The book we were discussing was Defeat: Why They Lost Iraq by Jonathan Steele of The Guardian. The other guests were Steele himself and Oliver Miles, former ambassador to Libya and organiser of the "ambassadors' letter" attacking Tony Blair's policies in the Middle East. This is my view of the book.

Steele's book is emblazoned with a commendation by the master of selective quotation, creative elision (scroll down) and bogus citation (scroll down) Noam Chomsky. The book is better than you might think from this. I've read two of Steele's previous books - one an account of East Germany, written in the 1970s, and the other about Soviet foreign policy, written in the early 1980s. Defeat shares many characteristics with those earlier works. Steele is a capable reporter who marshals a lot of factual material, and so far as I can see does so reliably. The weakness of the book is the huge lacunae in the argument, the extreme and untenable conclusion thereby derived, and the alarming regularity of preposterous assertions. In his book on East Germany, Steele named as the most successful German statesman since Bismarck not Konrad Adenauer, or even (given Steele's position on the Cold War) Willy Brandt, but the foul Stalinist tyrant Walter Ulbricht. Defeat likewise keeps bringing you up short.

In Defeat, Steele makes three particularly significant omissions. First, he writes almost nothing about the rationale of the Iraq intervention. Steele's message is: "The war was designed to send a message to the region and to the world that the USA was the Number One power, able and willing to project force to any part of the globe with or without UN approval." The book ought really to be illustrated with cartoons at this point. Whether or not you believe, as I do, that the war was justified, you should come to terms with the case advanced for pre-emptive war in an age of terrorist gangs and their state sponsors. A far better place to start in understanding American foreign policy since 9/11 is in the work of the historian John Lewis Gaddis, who in a long essay in Foreign Affairs in 2005 identified, as important elements of grand strategy, both "a broadly conceived right to pre-empt danger" and "the need to legitimize that strategy" through multilateral support. The Bush administration merits forceful criticism in its application of the first principle and insouciance regarding the second. But if you merely dismiss such considerations as a cover for naked power, you're missing a great deal of significance.

Secondly, the book's narrative stops at an unfortunate juncture for Steele's argument. Steele recounts President Bush's response, in January 2007, to the misguided Baker-Hamilton report (about which I commented here). The book's footnotes go up to last June, showing Steele was trying to keep his argument as current as possible. Yet there is no mention of General David Petraeus. Steele's central claim is that "defeat was inevitable once the USA decided to stay in Iraq after April 2003". Yet the experience of strategy in Iraq is not consistent. Terrorist forces in Iraq remain potent and abominable (this atrocity yesterday is among the sickest crimes I've ever heard of). Yet since the US changed course a year ago, and in particular since the surge in US troops reached its peak last summer, those enemies have been weakened. Notably, Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province have turned against al-Qaeda, and similar alliances with US forces have spread. It is true that this turn was initiated before the surge, but only when US forces under Colonel Sean MacFarland began to apply in the capital of Anbar province the techniques that have characterised the surge. The surge itself has been crucial in ensuring that the gains of that strategy have held and are spreading. Petraeus and his extraordinarily courageous forces have not won this war, but they have turned it into a war that is winnable.

Thirdly, there is a striking absence in Steele's book of the sort of progressive critique that you might once have reasonably expected from a Guardian correspondent. Steele, for example, lauds the ambassadors' letter opposing Tony Blair's policies: "Here was the voice of a generation of senior Foreign Office Arabists, ranged against a prime minister who did not understand the region." The notion that Arabism is a political tilt - and one that has served both political liberty and our own security peculiarly ill - rather than a disinterested regional specialism doesn't appear to have occurred to Steele. Steele correctly notes the huge numbers of Saddam's victims in the Anfal campaign in 1988 and the crushing of Shi'ah and Kurdish resistance in 1991, but soothingly adds: "These are huge numbers, but the available evidence suggests that Saddam's dictatorship was less harsh on Iraqis in 2003 than it had been a decade earlier." Tell that to the Marsh Arabs, whose numbers fell from 250,000 in 1991 to fewer than 40,000 in 2003, owing to Saddam's prolonged and deliberate genocidal campaigns.

This is, in short, not a useless book but it is a highly partial one. It is marred by a fatalistic and unfalsifiable thesis. In affecting to explain how "they" (i.e. we) lost Iraq, it disregards important countervailing evidence and ignores the strategic debates in Western foreign policy. There are much better books on the subject, some of which Steele himself acknowledges.

The tide has turned

This post appears on "Comment is Free".

Jonathan Steele's account of the defeat of western intervention in Iraq must have seemed a good idea in conception. Steele now has to make the best of the circumstance that, while his book was in press, events undermined him. Barring a fleeting reference to the multinational force's success in suppressing al-Qaida, his article this week might have been written a year ago for all its acknowledgement of Iraq's recent history.

I supported the Iraq war and would do so again. It was - to invoke Talleyrand's terminology - neither a crime nor a blunder to overthrow a gangster regime that was in breach of the UN security council resolutions (among many others) that marked the conditions for ceasefire in the first Gulf war in 1991. But it was nearly a failure. Culpable negligence by the Bush administration left post-Saddam Iraq without a functioning state. The combined forces of Baathism and jihadism (grotesquely lauded by some columnists on this newspaper as the "resistance") opportunistically filled that vacuum, with unmitigated barbarism and an appalling civilian death toll.

Steele believes defeat was foreordained, and scorns the notion that "a more intelligent and efficient occupation could have worked". It is, in fact, not difficult to see how a better strategy - in particular, one with more troops - might have worked after the fall of Saddam. That strategy has, after all, demonstrably produced results since President Bush changed course a year ago and appointed General David Petraeus as commander of the multinational force. Most important, Iraqis are safer since the surge in US troops reached full strength last June. According to Petraeus, speaking last month: "Every trend we watch is down roughly about 60%: civilian deaths, numbers of attacks, and thankfully our casualties are down as well."

That outcome is not fortuitous. I was fortunate to meet General Petraeus, and listen to his assessment of Iraq's security needs, before he took up his post. He has continually insisted that security is the prerequisite for political progress. To write of the surge's achievements is not to prettify the quality of life in Baghdad and its surrounding areas. But the successes - notably in turning Iraqi Sunnis in Anbar province and elsewhere against al-Qaida - are of the highest importance.

Al-Qaida sought to destroy nascent constitutional authority in Iraq. It is being rebuffed on the ground that it chose. Alongside the surge in US troops, there has been a surge in the recruitment of additional Iraqi troops and police. While acknowledging the sectarian character of the Maliki government and its failure to achieve conciliation at national level, Petraeus undemonstratively created facts on the ground.

Government sclerosis is no longer an insuperable obstacle to political advance. Iraq is far from a fully-fledged federal democracy, but neither does it conform to Steele's tendentious depiction of a project that lies in ruins. Two years ago, after the bombing of the Golden Dome mosque in Samarra, Iraq was in a state of incipient civil war. Now the US has belatedly found an effective counterinsurgency strategy, and the war against Baathism and jihadism is winnable. There is a serious prospect, at least, of a decentralised and pluralist Iraq where constitutional authority has something approaching a monopoly of the means of force.

I do not expect Guardian readers to share my admiration for Tony Blair's foreign policies. But it would be perverse for them to accept Steele's caricature of what has been achieved or deny the importance of Iraq's prospects to our security. One point the much-reviled neoconservatives have right is that Islamist terrorism has deep roots in the perpetuation of autocratic states in the Middle East. Denied an outlet in politics, dissent emerges in the only part of society open to it: religious fanaticism. The overthrow of the most bestial of despotisms in that region removes a crucial player and an appalling dynasty from that equation.

We can, moreover, verifiably assert that two of the states in the region that previously held WMD - Iraq and Libya - no longer do so, owing directly to our intervention. If Iran did indeed suspend the more overtly military aspects of its nuclear programme (though not uranium enrichment, for which its civil nuclear programme has no need) in late 2003, that is also suggestive that Saddam's overthrow gave greater impetus to the cause of nuclear non-proliferation than CND cares to acknowledge.

A year after Saddam's overthrow, the Nobel Peace Laureate José Ramos Horta said: "If I were a political leader of any consequence and I was asked a question regarding the options for Iraq, I would say that retreating and conceding victory to the terrorists is not an option - for the consequences are far too high to contemplate." Among the many errors and periodic disasters of post-war policy in Iraq, that one - the most damaging of any course we might take - has been avoided. Our allies in the region facing down the forces of theocratic reaction deserve nothing less than our continued commitment.

Enlightened selfish interest

This post appears on "Comment is Free".

When Oliver James argued, in his previous book, Affluenza, that "selfish capitalism" caused mental illness, critics were not slow in contrasting the grandiloquence of his assertions with the paucity of his evidence. Daniel Finkelstein of The Times commented: "His assertion of a causal link between inequality and mental illness is absolutely central to his book and he does not demonstrate it to be true."

James was clearly undaunted by the observation, for in his [Guardian] column yesterday he continued in identical vein. "By far the most significant consequence of 'selfish capitalism' (Thatch/Blatcherism)," he asserts, "has been a startling increase in the incidence of mental illness in both children and adults since the 1970s." I assume that, in his new book, he must have demonstrated this consequence of economic policies of which he disapproves, and has elected not to divulge that fact to Guardian readers. He surely cannot be relying on the anecdotal speculations that characterised his earlier work.

(Among many risible examples in Affluenza was James's suggestion that supporting New Labour in public makes you ill. You think I exaggerate? Citing the cases of Alastair Campbell, David Blunkett and - of all the well known political fixers - Stephen Fry, James noted darkly "the striking - if unsurprising - fact that none of these people showed any sign of recognising that their Virus values may have been crucial causes of their problems".)

So assuming - for the sake of argument - that James's case is thoroughly substantiated this time round, let me raise some political objections to his inferences. The notion that the policies of "Blatcherism", so deplored by James, are predicated on acquisitiveness doesn't even reach the level of caricature (though it might better be presented as a cartoon than a column). Since the mid-1970s (and not only since Thatcher assumed office in 1979), governments of both parties have indeed followed broadly similar policies, and on good grounds.

One of the principal reasons Labour became electable again under Tony Blair was that it finally managed to conceive of the public good as separate from producer interests. It is true that this was consistent with Thatcherism, and rightly so. Thatcher's labour market reforms were important for civic reasons, quite apart from the economic argument, in subjecting unaccountable trade union power to the rule of law.

Under New Labour, central bank independence and the "golden rule" of fiscal policy have a comparable rationale, in protecting the public interest from sectional demands. Government is restrained from stimulating the economy heedless of inflationary consequences. The story of "Blatcherism" is not selfishness but the management of special interests by establishing a framework of rules.

As it happens, I favour the European model of welfare capitalism (which I assume is what James means when he refers to "the Unselfish Capitalism of our neighbours"). I doubt that it is possible substantially to shrink the activities of the state, and consider that any attempt to do so would cause unnecessary hardship. When the Tories came up with an ill-advised scheme for flat taxes, I criticised it in print. I accept that New Labour has been unwarrantedly deferential to the views of industry (a lobby like any other), and I believe in a measure of economic redistribution so that citizens can exercise autonomous choices. But autonomy, not mental wellbeing, is the goal.

There is, admittedly, an expanding literature, far less tendentious than James's writings, on happiness as a goal of public policy. Yet an important line would be crossed should governments concern themselves with people's mental states. This is where the state is liable to legislate without proper regard for the private sphere.

Last year, even an investment bank (Deutsche Bank) published a report that identified countries that had "succeeded in implementing considerable happiness-enhancing changes" in the previous decade. (These were Ireland, Spain and the Scandinavians - though the authors made no reference to Denmark's notoriously high incidence of suicide (pdf).)

Ominously, the report counselled: "If the right priorities are set, other countries can also make corresponding progress." I find this a disturbing prospect. I would far rather governments aim for a disinterested framework of rules within which citizens may choose the good for themselves. Even the strongest admirers of Adam Smith are far from monomaniacs for selfishness. As the Nobel laureate Harry Markowitz, one of the founders of modern finance theory, wrote some years ago: "I believe that most find, as I do, that once some moderate needs for food and shelter are satisfied, utility depends more on how you spend your time than on how much money you make."

Oliver James might profitably have spent last year not writing another book but reading two of the best that appeared in 2007. Nick Cohen's What's Left? laments the obliviousness of parts of the left to the material advances of western societies in the last century. Hermione Lee's biography of Edith Wharton is a fine study of a novelist who depicted, among much else, the great wealth of old New York and Newport, Rhode Island. The book cites the scathing observations of Henry James about the waste evident in the grand palaces that were already becoming white elephants. Much has since changed in American society as well as our own.

A capitalism tempered by social pressure and legislative reform has secured, in the longer sweep of history, social equality and improvements in public health that were scarcely imaginable before universal suffrage. Liberalism is a very practical refutation of Oliver James's jeremiads.

Overrated and underrated works

The new issue of Prospect magazine carries a survey of contributors' opinions. The question is which aspects of culture - books, films, television shows, operas, plays, concerts - were respectively the most overrated and most underrated of 2007. This was my answer for the most overrated:

"Earlier volumes of Tony Benn’s diaries have contained much of political and human interest. More Time for Politics: Diaries 2001-2007 (Hutchinson), though, is a vainglorious and trivial document untempered by critical judgement or common sense. Benn’s account of his 2003 interview with Saddam Hussein—which for obsequiousness in the face of despotism would have put Robert Maxwell to shame—is exceeded in gullibility and tastelessness by the author’s reflections on the 9/11 “truth” campaign: “Probably, in their heart of hearts, most people think the attack was genuine, but I don’t rule anything out."

And this was my answer for the most underrated:

"As the messianic Holocaust denier holding the presidency of Iran might remind us, bizarre and atavistic ideas remain a potent force in world affairs. The most underrated book of 2007 is a model exposition of one such notion that has almost died out. Flat Earth by Christine Garwood (Macmillan) is an elegant and non-polemical study of a movement that is now a synonym for crankery, but whose methods of reasoning (consider the biblical literalism of “scientific creationism”) are with us always."

Books of the year

Here are some non-fiction titles I've read and enjoyed that were published this year (or in one case, published at the end of last year). I'll list half a dozen today and another half dozen later in the week.

It would surely be an understatement to describe Nick Cohen's What's Left? as book of the decade. I reviewed it here, and associated myself with its argument - oddly, not quite to universal acclaim among readers of the site - on "Comment is Free", here. Of the book, I said it was a cogent and impassioned essay on how ostensibly progressive movements had more than made their peace with political and even theocratic reaction. It's also blackly comic in parts. Don't miss the section on the corrupt rapist Gerry Healy, leader of the now defunct Workers' Revolutionary Party, and his fictional portrayal in Trevor Griffiths's once admired play The Party.

Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great is far superior in tone, style and range of reference to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. I enjoyed it hugely. I also applauded its message, not only because I too find religious apologetic incredible but because Christopher's secularism is grounded in the Jeffersonian principle of pluralism and a rejection of the notion of religious tests for public office. Not all atheists exemplify that principle.

Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins is the best biography of a widely misunderstood President. Diggins properly contrasts Reagan's moralism with his failure to resist "the sins of power, the temptation to operate covertly and circumvent the laws of democracy". But the overriding message is that Reagan was an Emersonian figure who perceived the fragility of Communism, yet who cooled the Cold War down, often with the most saccharine of rhetoric and the most bizarre notions (total nuclear abolition being the central one). Reagan was a complex figure; this book is one of very few to do justice to the paradoxes of Reaganism.

Some years ago a scholar with the fine biblical name of Ronald Numbers wrote a superb book called The Creationists, in which, without polemic and with some human sympathy towards the personalities involved, he described the evolution (so to speak) of modern Creationism. Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood is a similar kind of historical and cultural study of a perverse movement that has become a synonym for crankery. Ms Garwood doesn't mock, and makes the essential point that the reasoning of flat-earthers and biblical creationists has clear points in common.

Le modèle anglais, une illusion française by Agnès Poirier is a splendid polemic and the best statement I've come across of the case for French exceptionalism. Agnès is an Anglophile who has lived in the UK for a dozen years; agree with her thesis or not, she is cogent and often very funny about our society's idiosyncrasies and attitude to Europe. As for writers on the Murdoch press: "Leur profession: calomnier jour après jour l'Europe et ses dirigeants «à l’accent bizarre»." I trust you recognise yourselves, comrades, for it is not I.

Janacek: Years of a Life: (1914-1928) by John Tyrrell is the second volume of a massive biography of the Czech composer, and covers much the most interesting years of his life. After the end of WWI, with the establishment of the Czech Republic and inspired by a passionate affair with a woman 40 years his junior, Janacek produced great works that were poetic but unadorned by romantic affectation. This is a definitive biography of one of the great figures of 20th-century music, and above all of opera.

Norman Mailer

I've just seen that Norman Mailer has died. I'll write a proper appreciation later; he was genuinely a fine writer and not merely an interesting figure of cultural history. (The furious dispute between him and the feminist writer Kate Millett - in her book Sexual Politics - about Mailer's macho 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead is one of the great grudge matches of American literary life.) Like Orwell, Mailer was a reporter first and a novelist second. The best of his work - as in Advertisements for Myself, 1959 - combines those callings and is a lasting testament to a great talent.